‘Uncommon Women and Others’ at Melrose; ‘Boneheads’ at Friends and Artists; ‘Twigs’ at Theatre 40; ‘Sins of Flesh’ at Carpet Company

Memory plays often unfold languorously. Wendy Wasserstein’s “Uncommon Women and Others” recalls college days at a fairly snappy pace. The uncommon women have various reasons for attending a reunion in a restaurant six years after graduation, but none of them want to linger over it too long. That was then, this is now.

Pat Carroll’s staging at the Melrose Theatre, alas, lingers. Last week, a protracted delay in the opening scene, plodding transitions and a lack of ensemble cohesiveness gave the feeling of a college yearbook’s pages slowly turning.

As yearbooks go, this is a fairly thin one. The women of Mt. Holyoke College are indefatigably distinct personalities, but Wasserstein typically uses the distinctions for the most familiar comic touches (the goody-good versus the cynic, the cold overachiever versus the charming procrastinator). When Wasserstein goes deeper, such as Holly (Tara Karsian) calling a doctor she had a crush on, and realizing that the crush has crashed, it rings hollow.

The word is that Wasserstein successfully goes beyond creating types and amusing banter in her new play, “The Heidi Chronicles” (now in New York). The types and banter in “Uncommon Women”--funniest and most interesting when they involve reconciling whims and feminist intents--are handled by the cast with increasing confidence as the night wears on.

Gigi Rice lends sympathy to a woman at peace with her shortcomings and Caline Bertrand impresses us as a person too big and adventurous for this campus. Ruth Engel’s house mother is more hesitant than daft, but Cheryl Richardson jumps into her role as the goody-good with relish. Sarah Essex, Karsian, Wendy Rhodes and Kimberly Chase carry much of the play’s load, but without energetic focus. Perhaps no actress could find the compass to Carter, a silent, brainy student who ends up making a movie about Wittgenstein. Juliet Landau gives it the old college try.

‘Boneheads’

The men in Bill Bozzone’s “Buck Fever” and Jane Nixon Willis’ “Slam” don’t quite deserve the appellation used as the umbrella title for the two one-acts at Friends and Artists Theatre: “Boneheads.” You wish, though, that Bozzone and Nixon had some bright ideas to match their facility as TV writers.

Bozzone’s men are stuck in a mountain cabin without a car; their wives have driven off, disgusted with waiting for their husbands to kill a buck. Ernie (Ken Hanes), the sensitive one, is sure he caught the women in bed together before they took off. Ray (Tony Carreiro), full of blustery machismo, goes from denial to revenge: Sure that they’ll return, Ray surmises that if the wives catch the men in bed, that will even the score.

We’re in sitcom land, something out of an episode of the Tom Hanks-Peter Scolari series, “Bosom Buddies.” Things devolve with predictably horrid results for Ernie and Ray, but it’s a horror that almost needs commercial breaks. Mary Stern’s direction elicits laughs, yet there’s never any attempt at making us feel strongly for the predicament. That attempt is what distinguishes theater from the tube.

Nixon’s men in “Slam” are boys, really--headbangers mending their wounds in a punk club’s bathroom (Skip Stellrecht and Robert Arentz). About to leave high school, they have some life decisions ahead of them.

Theater people, perhaps because they spend most of their time in the theater, seldom capture a rock ‘n’ roll milieu on stage. “Slam” continues the sorry tradition. Depicting headbangers as clean of expletives and well-versed on Druids and other arcana only shows the alienation of the writer from her subject. The inauthenticities extend to the less-than-punk hair styles and attitudes of Stellrecht and Arentz under Clay Wilcox’s direction, and to the odd disappearance of music after the opening minutes.

‘Twigs’

Drawn deep from the well of Neil Simon, George Furth’s “Twigs” is designed to show off an actress’ skill--Sada Thompson’s (who did it first), or anyone else willing to play three daughters and their mother in four consecutive scenes, and willing to look past Furth’s relentlessly shoddy writing.

The first bad idea at Theatre 40 was to do the play at all (the press release reports that it was an “actor-generated project,” without informing us which actors “generated” it). The second, even worse idea was to split the roles among four actresses (Annie O’Donnell, Gloria Stroock and Dorothy Sinclair as the daughters, Harriet Medin as mother), thus eliminating the play’s one distinctive gimmick.

On a makeshift Richard Fullerton set, director Barth Benedict’s cast provides no reason why four actresses are better than one. Not only do O’Donnell, Stroock and Sinclair hardly resemble each other, but none of them seems even remotely related to Medin’s Irish-accented mother. When a show’s one consistent element is bad judgment, even free admission is too much to ask.

‘Sins of the Flesh’

Sins of the flesh can be funny, as long as the sinners aren’t made to look helplessly silly in the process. This caveat is lost on “Sins of the Flesh,” three one-acts brimming with pointless silliness and bad taste without style at the Carpet Company Stage.

The point of Tom Jacobson’s “Breath of God,” for instance, should be that mentally impaired Jeremy (a woefully mannered Joseph Grimm) learns the difference between sacrifice and suicide. Pastor Al wants Jeremy to deliver a sermon, despite Jeremy’s sister’s protestations--all this at the church pulpit before the congregation enters. This contrived situation makes the conflicts and choices thin and unbelievable. Dana Stevens directed, without a sense of buildup.

Randy Schlossman’s dig at priests and nuns carnally tempted, “Nuns’ Buns,” is without a sense of comedy. Father Wendell Winkie’s alter-ego/demon, Flesh, materializes so he can loosen Wendell up. Michael Niemand is a strangely Yiddish demon for A.P. Behar’s priest. Director Wally Kurth, like Schlossman, keeps things halfheartedly irreverent: Something of British satire’s skewering of the Church of England is needed here.

Nothing is needed for writer-director Andrew Campbell’s “The Last Day of Lottie Love,” for nothing can save it. Lottie (Margaret Silbar), an over-the-hill star, might make a comeback if her nerdy son (David Dionisio) or his fantasies don’t get her first. So muddy is the writing, direction and comic intent that the fantasies could just as well be Lottie’s. Michelle Ramos’ cut-rate set makes matters even muddier.