Two New One-Acts on Gay Themes

The inherently artificial task of exploring human experience on stage poses a fundamental dilemma for modern playwrights--whether to persuade the audience to suspend disbelief through carefully crafted naturalism or play on its awareness of artifice with heightened theatricality.

Combining both approaches in a single work is a volatile mix that undermines some of the excellent intentions in the seriocomic “Cloud Dancing,” the more prominent of two new gay-themed one-acts by Dennis Safren at Moving Arts.

Safren gives a compelling performance as Gene Katz, a Reform Rabbi (he lifts his sermon ideas from the “Fiddler on the Roof” soundtrack) whose complacent lifestyle as a closeted homosexual is upended by the appearance of an AIDS-infected former student (a frail but determined Michael Albala) whom he failed to recognize during their one-night stand three years earlier.

Despite the best efforts at modulation by director Marvin Werlin, their inexorably mounting confrontation teeters uncertainly between realistic exchanges and soapbox polemics. In this context, Albala’s politically charged tirades about the oppression of gays come across like preaching to the cantor, as it were. And for someone who professes to want to help the mentor he reveres and loves, he goes about his revelations in a nasty cat-and-mouse manner that frequently crosses the line between believable emotional ambivalence and histrionic cruelty.

It’s only in the affecting finale that the piece finds its authentic feeling heart, with Katz achieving a painful but necessary completion by freeing his life from hypocrisy.

“Fluffy, No!,” the more comically toned bit of, er, fluff that opens the evening, finds a gay couple (Mark Chaet and Michael Scott Shaw) suddenly facing the death of the prized cat that had become the center of their relationship. Despite the sexual frankness, their innocuous “Ozzie and Harriet” conundrums won’t pose any difficulties for straight audiences, but cat owners may find themselves mortally offended.

* “Cloud Dancing” and “Fluffy, No!,” Moving Arts, 1822 Hyperion Ave., Silver Lake. Thursdays - Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends April 29. $12. (213) 665-8961. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.