FESTIVAL ‘ 90 : STAGE REVIEWS : OPEN FESTIVAL : ‘Now That We’ve Got Your Attention . . . ‘

Haris Orkin’s one-acts at the Complex’s Dorie Theatre, “Sex” and “Impotence and International Terrorism,” are as far apart from each other as your bedroom and Moammar Kadafi’s Libya.

In “Sex,” three couples of various age, ethnicity and girth carry on a post-coital conversation, with the dialogue shifting from bed to bed. That it’s the same conversation, whether we’re listening to Nathaniel H. Harris and Shauna Bloom in bed No. 1, Robert O’Haver and Lisa Orkin in bed No. 2 or Richard Eisner and Barbara Schillaci in bed No. 3, becomes its own mildly amusing comment on the universality of male-female incomprehension. This also flattens the kind of individuality that good sexual comedy revels in.

O’Haver returns in “Impotence” as a detective guarding a psychologist (Jon C. Slade) whose new book exposes the sexual shortcomings of a dictator modeled on Kadafi. Now, the dictator has supposedly unleashed his terrorist squad on the doctor.

In the Salman Rushdie era, this isn’t so incredible. Orkin touches on serious ideas (violence as compensation for impotence), but his main purpose is to spin a variation on the “Odd Couple” and cop-buddy formulas. The piece ends in a hail of gunfire and nonsense, but Joseph Megel directs O’Haver and Slade with the notion of letting these good actors plumb their characters as far as they can.