THEATER REVIEW : One-Act Festival: Short but Powerful

Some people think theater should have nothing to do with its bastard grandchild, TV. Is it unseemly for television people to use the stage to develop “product”? Not at all, if you look at this year’s Act One Festival at the MET Theatre, produced by Showtime, in association with Paramount Network TV, Viacom and Grammnet, product-seeking TV companies all.

Flesh-and-blood producers Risa Bramon Garcia and Jerry Levine present an evening in which the actors are deeply invested, the directors have made strong choices, and the sets are simple and evocative. In Evening C, the third and final of the festival, the four plays themselves may tend toward the slender, but, hey, they’re one-acts. If you don’t like one, another one will be along shortly, in a half hour or so.

Hal Linden and Barbara Tarbuck star in “After All,” Vincent Canby’s depiction of a warring couple in bed on their 70th wedding anniversary. Canby wrote the play during his tenure as New York Times film critic, before he took over the job of chief drama critic at the paper. Director Roxanne Messina Captor coaxes forth the play’s gentle humor while, for the most part, holding treacle at bay.

Imagine the Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn of “Adam’s Rib” in their 90s. They are a privileged, competitive couple that has lived a somewhat unconventional life, the memory of which is strewn with long-ago love affairs that still rankle and burn. Predictably, the ending finds the two dissolving into laughter and holding hands, while Bobby Short sings “Our Love Is Here to Stay.” These plays all conclude sentimentally and a little too neatly, which may be a requisite of works being considered for television.

Edward Allan Baker’s “A Dead Man’s Apartment” starts riotously, gets quickly lost, and then hits some authentically strange comedy. A large nervous man, Lonnie (Pruitt Taylor Vince), is having an affair with Nickie (Amy Pietz), a woman with a Brooklyn accent, big hair and a scary way of switching from passion to extreme practicality. A generally clueless guy, Lonnie must pass a test--he must meet the approval of Nickie’s extremely skeptical brother (Jay Thomas) and punky daughter (Brittany Murphy). Lonnie not only doesn’t pass the test, but he also fails fantastically. The play is directed by Bramon Garcia.

In Cassandra Medley’s “Dearborn Heights,” two genteel young “Negro” women meet at the wrong lunch counter in a Michigan suburb in 1952. Michole White and Tina Lifford are both excellent as women whose strained politeness toward each other disintegrates completely when they realize they are not wanted in the restaurant. The play is overly schematic in spelling out its message about why we behave badly toward each other. But the detailed direction of Kate Baggott highlights the play’s virtues and minimizes its flaws.

Finally, Jason Katims’ “Who Made Robert De Niro King of America?” has the funniest lines and some killer comedy timing from the cast, directed by Asaad Kelada. Susan Knight plays a once successful novelist with writer’s block. Her construction worker husband (Christopher Meloni) is at work on a screenplay. Joanna Gleason is a sexually voracious, hotshot agent who sets off intense writerly envy between the two. It all concludes--guess how--neatly and sentimentally, very much as a good half-hour sitcom would.

Whether or not some version of these plays end up on the small screen is irrelevant to theater-goers in the here and now. “Act One ‘95” brings production values of a quality not usually found in a theater this size. The evening is an end in itself.

* “Act One ‘95: Evening C,” MET Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford Ave., Hollywood, (213) 957-1152. Tonight and June 14, 15, 19, 21-23 and 26, 7:30 p.m., Saturday and June 24 and 25, 5 and 9 p.m., Sunday and June 18, 3 p.m. Ends June 26. $19. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes. (Running in repertory with Evening B, please call for times).