One-Acts at Inner City Center; ‘Monster Duet’ at McCadden Place; ‘The Calling’ at Mise En Scene; ‘Things That Go Bump’ at West Coast

Two one-acts, one poignant and the other hilarious, are giving the annual short play competition at the Inner City Cultural Center a good name.

“Autumn Heat” is the blanket title for a quartet of pieces that won last year’s ICCC contest.

Two of the four are knockouts. The opening pair, featuring Margaret Avery (Shug of “The Color Purple”) and Francesca Roberts (“Frank’s Place”) flare like the scratch of a match.

In “Lucy & Callie,” Avery plays an old lady, white-haired with granny glasses and a stooped gait. She is returning home with her sister (a tender Elizabeth Lindsey) from her husband’s funeral.

This is an endearing, laconic work written by Lorenzo Buford that captures the love between two sisters as they recall the men in their lives, drink tea from their best china and, then, imperceptibly, clasp hands, lean back on their sofa, and die.

Director Diann McCannon never lets the theatrical license lapse into sentimentality. Avery’s performance is ripened, mellow, even bawdy. Its reticence illuminates a mourning old woman in her best dress, home from her final war.

The second play, “Willie & Esther” by James Bronson, is a riot, displaying McCannon’s versatility as a director. The entitled characters are a dude and his chick standing outside a bank, arguing whether to rob it. Esther, the brains here, thinks Willie is crazy. But she loves him.

Roberts is deliciously raucous as a glaring, hands-on-husky-hips, no-dummy survivor. The wiry Hugh Dane is equally vivid in his aloha shirt and his stream of nervous jive.

The other one-acts, directed by Edmund J. Cambridge, can’t stand up to this kind of heat. Kathleen Mazzola’s “Katinka & Lorraine” features Avery as a self-absorbed Broadway actress bumping into an old friend, now a bitter rival (Jeanne Sakata). The play is superficial, the characters tedious.

The last of the menu, “George & Grace,” is a love song to a long, married life, reflected in the dramatized memories of a husband lingering over his wife’s grave.

This play is bloated because writer James Hawthorne gives us a family album instead of a few selected snapshots. Sometimes less is more. The performances of Taurean Blacque and Edwina Moore are brushed with natural affection.

At 1308 S. New Hampshire Ave.; Wednesday, Sunday, 3 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday, 8 p.m.; ends Sunday. Tickets: $10-$15. (213) 387-1161.

‘Monster Duet’

It’s surprising to find inordinately creative writing in a double-bill horror show, but half of “Monster Duet,” playing at the McCadden Place Theatre, is mesmerizing.

Ernest Kearney’s one act, “The Little Boy Who Loved Monsters,” races with a phantasmagoric, demon moon in a spellbinding performance by Keith MacKechnie as a bewitched youth who hears dinosaur noises.

Kearney directed and wrote both plays and stars in the second, “The Dictyoptera”--which, by contrast, is an inflated booby prize that seems the work of an amateur.

But with “The Little Boy Who Loved Monsters,” Kearney exercises control, momentum, and fashions leaps of verbal imagination. The boy’s language spirals in twisting, rhymed, angry, future-speak. You’re reminded of Anthony Burgess’ verbal cleverness in “A Clockwork Orange.”

First Kearney sets you up with a fascinating account of the boy’s wretched behavior. He did eat his mother’s Pekingese dog, reports a housekeeper (a soothing, decorous performance by Synthia L. Hardy) to the boy’s psychologist (a pompous turn by Archie Lee Simpson).

When we finally see the malevolent kid, in preppy clothes and pointy hair, he is in his shrink’s office, his body draped backwards on a chair with his head on the floor. MacKechnie’s physical and linguistic contortion act is gripping. The bizarre, sci-fi ending is satisfying because of its inevitability.

The second, four-character play is comic book Kafka, which would be OK if it weren’t so flabby and woodenly acted in two instances. In any event, Cleeve Hall merits a post-Halloween mask for his monster designs.

At 1157 N. McCadden Place, Thursdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., indefinitely. Tickets: $10. (213) 466-1977.

‘The Calling’

The nicest touch in this East Texas drama about loss of faith is the Elvis Presley music. The year is 1956, when Elvis burst on the scene with “Heartbreak Hotel,” and the mood-setting Elvis numbers smartly backdrop the conflict between religion and rock ‘n’ roll in Susan Taggart’s “The Calling,” at the Mise en Scene Theater.

The production, co-directed by Karen Harris and John Lansing, has a tone redolent of front porch swings and your grandmother’s frame house.

But the family turmoil, focused on a minister (Joseph Taggart) whose heart is in the oil fields, is leaden instead of mercurial. There’s too much Baptist hand-wringing here, not enough rock ‘n’ roll rebellion. A younger evangelical brother (Mark Harrison) is too noble to endure.

The brothers’ fundamentalist mother is well drawn by Rachel Bard. But the production’s striking performance comes from an underdeveloped rockabilly character, the family’s black sheep half-brother, expressively rendered by Michael Crabtree.

Erna Gregory’s adolescent Elvis nut is welcome relief, and Walter Wood’s callow church deacon briefly lights up the dry atmosphere like a character out of Sinclair Lewis.

At 11305 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood, Thursday through Sunday, 8 p.m., closes Sunday. Tickets: $12.50-$15. (818) 763-3101 .

‘And Things That Go Bump in the Night’

Terrence McNally’s notorious, early dark comedy about the cruelty of fear--”And Things That Go Bump in the Night”--is receiving an appropriately lurid revival at the West Coast Ensemble.

The play’s overwrought, pretentious theater of the grotesque is as hard to take now as it must have been when it went bump two weeks after its Broadway opening in 1965.

This production, directed by Eileen Frank, features a razor-honed, dangerous performance by Jeff Bennett as the monstrous son of a monstrous family that dwells in a cellar house surrounded by an electric fence to ward off a post-nuclear terror outside.

For amusement, the family, led by Olive Dunbar’s wickedly operatic mother, lures a dreamy, hapless youth (James Thomas Bailey) into a homosexual act with the seductive son. Then the victim is forced to watch it on film. It’s the end of him. A churlish, mean sister is poorly acted by the miscast Moonie Ahmed.

McNally was expanding here on contemporary attitudes and paranoia (the 1960s were the years of back-yard bomb shelters). As a curiosity piece, this play has some interest. But, thankfully, McNally moved on to more genuine work.

At 6240 Hollywood Blvd., Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 3 p.m., through Nov. 13. Tickets: $10-$12.50. (213) 871-1052.