‘Fantastic Four-Play’ Just Doesn’t Satisfy : Eclectic Company stages a quartet of one-acts whose takes on sex, death and the macabre seem strained.

When he was a young, precocious playwright in his early 20s, Jon Robin Baitz struck many listeners as sounding old--not old-fashioned, but much older than his age would suggest. We don’t know Brian Nohr’s age, but based on his new quartet of short plays at the Eclectic Company Theatre, he sounds young.

Unfortunately, it’s a case of sounding young in mostly the worst ways. Take the evening’s title, “Far Out and Fantastic Four-Play,” which sounds way too much like the neighborhood teenage stoner enthusing over nothing. But this doesn’t strike you as wrong until later, after seeing four plays that are so calculatedly far out that they’re not, and are definitely not fantastic.

Like an overly amped grad student who’s read many writers but experienced little life, Nohr writes his plays as strained exercises in language play (mostly careening between Baudelaire and Kerouac) and laden with the sense that he believes he is experimenting--as if 30 years of Julian Beck, Sam Shepard, Joe Chaikin and Howard Brenton had not happened.

Typical here is the opener, “House of the Holy,” an incoherent musing on death directed by Philippe Denham. Andie Lynne, as a clubbing gal named Jingle Bells, enters what she thinks is a nightspot, only to discover an old man (Michael Vincent Allen) about to die and a crazy guy named Bowie Boy (Rich Campion) waiting for death to occur. It can’t come soon enough.

“Old Wig Absurdities” is a crudely titled semi-comic piece, directed by Lori Street-Tubert, about how Anne Faulkner’s grandmother (to Brandon Johnson’s bratty-turned-nice grandson Peter) stops enjoying entertaining her kooky friends who play-act historic celebrities. Charlene Sher as Queen Elizabeth, Patricia Lee Willson as the Virgin Mary and Janice Davies as a female version of Alfred Hitchcock can’t boost Nohr’s lame comic writing, though Johnson and Faulkner share the evening’s one true emotional moment.

“The Necrophiliac and the Plagiarist” suggests a potential sadness underlying Nohr’s love affair with style for style’s sake, but this macabre look at a mortician’s desires for the dead is mostly a showcase for the mercurial range of veteran actor Philip McKeown.

The night ends in the pure gibberish of “Do the Calisthenic Dog,” in which a motley group, including an Army grunt (Stuart Schreiber), a pregnant woman (Laura P. Vega) and an aging hippie (L. Michael Craig) are stuck in a waiting room with what sounds like a man-eating lion on the other side of the door. As with all of these one-acts, any effective absurdity is undone by poorly crafted verbal spew--this time with an arch, Kerouac-like spin to it.

* “Far Out and Fantastic Four-Play,” Eclectic Company Theatre, 5312 Laurel Canyon Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Sept. 13. $12.50. (818) 557-0465. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.