Evenings of one-act plays can cause theatrical whiplash. That’s certainly the case with “Summer Shorts 5: Series B.”
Now running in rep with the recently opened Series A, featuring work by Christopher Durang, Neil LaBute and others, this one bounces between a dizzying array of voices, settings and themes — from the Holocaust to witchcraft, 1950s Puerto Rico to the present-day Waldorf-Astoria.
“Some Women in Their Thirties Simply Start To Fall” by Tina Howe (“Painting Churches”) is the delight of the evening. It concerns a Manhattan woman (Crystal Finn) who literally loses her head in front of Citarella on the Upper West Side.
Desperately singing show tunes in an attempt to attract her flailing body, she’s soon rescued by a handsome, and yes, single doctor (Ryan Shams). Billy Hopkins’ clever staging adds to the silly fun.
Will Scheffer’s “The Green Book” is both far more ambitious and frustrating. It concerns the visit of married couple Ben (Neal Huff) and Sam (Christian Campbell) to Ben’s dementia-afflicted mother (Rebecca Schull), whose speech consists of little more than the repeated phrase “I think of you often.”
After Ben bickers with his sister (Jodie Markell) over their mother’s care, she delivers a shocking revelation about their father, a Holocaust survivor. The play uneasily blends comic one-liners with such stylized moments as the mother’s interior monologues. New Age-style music, the repeated sound of breaking glass and portentous lines of dialogue like “I smell gas” contribute to the jarringly uneven tone.
The other efforts, Keith Reddin’s “Clap Your Hands,” about the tension-filled dinner between two married couples on New Year’s Eve, and José Rivera’s “Lessons for an Unaccustomed Bride,” depicting the encounter between a 16-year-old virginal bride and a witch who offers to put her fiancé under a spell so he won’t cheat on her, are mildly entertaining diversions.