Theater Reviews : ‘Six at Eight’ Does Not Compute : The South O.C. Community Theatre presents short plays by new and veteran authors, with uneven results.

A playwright was asked recently about the difficulties of cramming as much play into as little time as possible. “The 10-minute play?” he asked in response. “I always think it’s impossible to do. . . . Maybe I’ll figure it out someday.”

The impression left by “Six at Eight,” a sextet of plays 10 minutes and longer at the Camino Real Playhouse, is that it, indeed, may be impossible to do. But perhaps the failure is more the fault of this production than of the form itself.

Perhaps, for instance, the South Orange County Community Theatre shouldn’t have tried to group efforts by obviously inexperienced writers--the three winners of the theater’s first 10-minute play contest--with pieces by such veteran scribes as Richard Dresser and Richard Greenberg. On a ballclub, a mix of veterans and rookies is ideal. But in the theater, unless the rookie is a prodigy, he or she is going to get shown up.

Rookie S. Michele McFadden’s “Lunch at McDonald’s,” directed by B.J. Scott, places a vegetarian mother and her meat-eating son at a McDonald’s in the middle of the Arizona desert (she’s hungry and can’t wait anymore). Everything that follows is either a predictable hashing-over of cattle-in-the-rain forest stuff, or a very unlikely surprise artificially driving the comedy along.

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McFadden won the short-play contest; Lynda Duffy Wilson’s unfunny “Fair Trade Agreement” came in second. Again, a woman finds herself in an uncomfortable consumer emporium of instant iconic impact: Gucci’s, where handbags cost $400. A penny-pinching teacher, she is not used to such luxurious, conspicuous consumption. The catch is that the bag was a gift, from one of her students in the fourth grade.

Great farces have been set up on flimsier stuff, but the keys--lively comic dialogue and characters--are missing here. And director Joe Slevcove hasn’t been able to energize his actors, LaDonna DeBarros and Thomas Roden.

Third place went to Richard Rawe’s “The Swallow,” interesting only for the fact that we, while sitting in a theater in Capistrano, are listening to a play that is set in Capistrano. Rawe bookends his piece about lost love with an older man (Rawe himself) reciting a love poem; in between, we see a young man and woman (Tim Mull and Kristin More) hoping to see the mission swallows only to find out that she must leave for Singapore. Rawe’s unintentionally comic, antique writing, remindful of 19th-Century opera libretti, sticks in the throats of the actors under Timothy Pacific’s direction.

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Alternating with these new works are three not-so-new, published pieces: Michael Bigelow Dixon and Valerie Smith’s dumb love triangle comedy “Apres Opera,” directed by B. Aaron Cogan; Dresser’s frequently staged but always charming “Bed and Breakfast,” directed by Giovanna Fusco and capped with a fine performance by Louise Tonti as the hapless B&B; hostess, and the real find, Greenberg’s absurdist “The Author’s Voice.”

The story of a neophyte writer (David Kelso) who keeps a living, breathing, gnome-like muse (Aaron Charney) cooped up in a closet, this is Greenberg’s unpredictable imagining of the revenge a muse can take on a supposed “creator.” For those who saw his recent “Night and Her Stars” at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, it will provide a glimpse at an utterly different side of Greenberg’s world.

* “Six at Eight,” Camino Real Playhouse, 31776 El Camino Real, San Juan Capistrano. Fridays-Sunday, 8 p.m. Ends Sunday. $10. (714) 489-8082. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes. A South Orange County Community Theatre production of short plays by S. Michele McFadden, Michael Bigelow Dixon and Valerie Smith, Lynda Duffy Wilson, Richard Dresser, Richard Rawe, and Richard Greenberg.