‘Four by Tennessee’ Honors a Master

Tennessee Williams fans should relish the obscure one-acts assembled in “Four by Tennessee,” which opens the Fountain Theatre’s four-month tribute to the late playwright.

Sketchy and less penetrating than Williams’ more familiar classics, these vignettes nevertheless afford fresh examples of a masterful control of language unequaled in American theater. Like his haunted protagonists, Williams’ dialogue leaps from the mundane to the poetic in startling tonal pivots.

Insightful staging by co-directors Deborah Lawlor and Hope Alexander-Willis transforms the intimate Fountain second stage into a series of landscapes for the often touching, sometimes chilling and always lyrical retreat by fragile psyches into private worlds besieged by the callous indifference around them.

In “Lord Byron’s Love Letter,” a prim spinster (Moray Koontz) lapses into idyllic reveries as she recites the story of a tryst between her grandmother (Damara Reilly) and the Romantic poet, only to be jerked back to reality by the disagreeable old woman. Only an abrupt, O. Henry-ish final twist betrays a still-maturing author.

Another early work, “The Strangest Kind of Romance,” supplies the emotional heart of the evening in a poignant tale of a solitary factory worker (Doug Chambers) who finds solace from an abusive landlady (Casey Kramer) in his love for a cat.

Two works from the “Dragon Country” anthology round out the quartet. “I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow” depicts an unsettling exchange between a seriously ill recluse (Lawlor) and the painfully introverted visitor (Matt K. Miller) determined to help her through what looks like her final night. Ending the evening on a comic note, “A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot” features Koontz and Sharon Madden as a pair of nosy, hilariously inebriated gossips also seen in “The Rose Tattoo”; this time they’re pillaging New Orleans as women’s auxiliary members at a fraternal order convention.

Whether in humor or tragedy, the consistently fine performances drive home Williams’ signature theme that for sensitive souls, sharp-edged reality can be a brutal place.

* “Four by Tennessee,” Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave., Hollywood. Wednesdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 5 p.m., Sundays, 3 p.m.; plus next Friday, July 15, 19, 8 p.m.; July 14, 21, 7 p.m. $15. (213) 663-1525. Ends July 28. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.