A FESTIVAL OF PLAYS AT SKYLIGHT

Deja vu is in the air at the Skylight Theatre, where “The First L.A. Playwrights Festival” (the first ?) is holding forth. The festival is designed to show off the best work of Joseph Scott Kierland’s Los Angeles Playwrights’ Group. The newest as well--or so one would presume.

But in both “Living and Dyeing” and “Sex in the Afternoon,” (two of the festival’s three sections) new plays are not the order of the day. (Nor are they in the third section, “West Side Stories,” consisting of “Dream Man” and “Precious Organs,” both previously reviewed.)

Robert Harders’ “Living” does have a new title. When it premiered in the annual new play festival of the old Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre (Kierland’s former home), it was called “Social Security,” a better name that one hopes wasn’t replaced to avoid confusion with Andrew Bergman’s comedy of the same name.

Otherwise, nothing has changed. The same couple, Louise and Bernie (Ivy Bethune and Len Lesser), are having the same fight over the same things. He wants her to stop eavesdropping on the sparring neighbors. She wishes he’d keep his voice down. He thinks her romantic dreams in old age are silly. She’d like her old flame to re-ignite.

Bittersweet comedy always suffers from prolongation, and Harders hasn’t tightened up Louise and Bernie’s feuding and making up since last we saw it. With Chuck Workman directing, Lesser overemphasizes Bernie’s exhaustion at the expense of comic timing. Bethune gives her pensioner passion without telegraphing it.

Festival material it’s not. Paul David White’s “Dyeing” is more like it--flaws and all. Ruth (Dona Hardy) is dyeing her sister Sally’s hair (Jeanette Miller) while their aunt is dying in the next room. An obvious pun, and White’s alternately maudlin and black play embodies it. Instead of fighting the cliche, he writes his sisters as living polarities: Ruth attends Bible sessions, while Sally likes nothing better than a dance.

Neither of them change; they just get to know each other a bit better. The mood is like lavender, invaded by the aunt’s pained wailing (sound designers Brad Brinkman and Phil Allen mask this with unevocative synthesized hums) and some very snappy dialogue that’s often more alive than Hardy’s and Miller’s performances. (Lacy Bishop directed.)

“Sex in the Afternoon” is a livelier set, beginning with a quirky, irreverent cover of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” (Marcy Levy belts it out while tied to a chair.) This leads into Kierland’s “The Tuning Fork,” as neurotic and demented as its characters.

Fred’s a crossword puzzle writer (Darryl Henriques) who uses Cynthia (Beth Grant) as a sounding board. Fred “writes” by laying out the letters on the floor, but when he and Cynthia know that things have come to an impasse, they release tensions with some kinky, very original activity.

Given material up to his talents, Henriques can generate a weird, mercurial presence. Kierland provides him and Grant less with characters than with comedic vehicles, and they drive them very far, with Gary Guidinger directing.

Levy returns with another equally macabre, more scatological number that completely eclipses Kitty Johnson’s “Strawberry Envy,” staged too often (once in the LAAT festival) and worse for the wear. Dennis Holanhan is an ideal Man in White fantasy figure and Leland Crooke is a nicely subdued rube, but Joan Foley’s daydreaming Emily isn’t fixated in the South where she belongs--more like the mid-Atlantic. Director Roxanne Rogers should correct this.

Performances at 1816 1/2 N. Vermont Ave. “Living and Dyeing” on Saturday, 3:30 p.m.; Sunday, 8 p.m.; July 4, 8 p.m.; July 5, 3:30 p.m.; July 10, 8 p.m.; July 11, 3:30 p.m.; July 17, 8 p.m.; July 18, 3:30 p.m. “Sex in the Afternoon” on Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 11 p.m.; July 4, 3:30 p.m.; July 5, 8 p.m.; July 11, 11 p.m.; July 12, 8 p.m.; July 18, 8 p.m.; July 19, 3:30 p.m. Tickets: $10; (213) 466-1767.