Five New One-Acts Prove Refreshing in ‘From My Lips’

Glaxa Studios continues its rise as one of the city’s most consistent venues for emerging and established theatrical artists with “From My Lips, to Your Ears,” a series of five new one-acts by women.

That these plays are by women seems refreshingly incidental to the works themselves. Whatever “messages” we take away with us after the fact are couched in dramatic content, not polemical intent.

The least successful efforts bookend the main events. The evening’s opener, Angela Crosato’s “Saloons and Saviours,” directed by Wayne Chema, retreads the beer-soaked floorboards of the losers-meeting-in-a-bar play already worn thin by John Patrick Shanley et al. An elliptical interchange between a recently released serial killer and his former girlfriend, “Reunion,” written and directed by Sharon Yablon, closes the bill on a derivative note.

The three middle plays, all directed by Bruce Mason, constitute the aesthetic bulk of this challenging program. In Fiona Hogan’s visceral pas de deux “Anna’s Needle,” Anna (Hogan) and Joe (Andrew James Jones), whose wife has recently died in childbirth under Anna’s care, dance on a pinpoint of violence and piercing desire. Deborah Lemen’s rawly sexual “Screendoor Slams” features the very funny Lemen as a twitchy, desperately accommodating female who’s tired of substituting lubricity for companionship. And in her uproarious tour de force, “Safehouse,” Andrea Stein coquettishly peels away the layers of her gushing, oh-so-girlish persona, revealing the murderous feminist rage just underneath.

* “From My Lips, to Your Ears,” Glaxa Studios, 3707 Sunset Blvd., Silver Lake. Mondays-Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Ends April 16. $10. (213) 644-1483. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.