COMING UP SHORT

Everyone thinks one-act plays are easy, quick, short and effortless. But a short play is more difficult to deal with than a full-length play, a truth most one-act festivals drive home.

This year’s One-Act Festival, presented by Orange Coast College Repertory in Costa Mesa, is no exception. Of the six plays in the festival, only four are shown at each performance, and the four seen run the gamut of quality, style and content.

Sam Shepard’s “4-H Club,” written early in his career when he was still just putting down anything on paper, is the best example here of how not to write a play. It’s formless, pointless and pretentious. But the staging by director Jeffrey Roma also shows how exciting theater can be found in a negligible script that’s approached with intelligence and style. Roma sees the poetry inherent in Shepard’s writing and conducts the play like a piece of music.

Three generic guys, dopers zonked on coke, wander through a typical early Shepard wasteland of debris and junk, cutting lines of cocaine on a mirror and declaiming about their varied visions and hallucinations. There is no point to it all, but Roma and his actors--Keith Bennett, Jeff Marx and particularly the kinetic and intricately shaded Adam Gubman--give it excitement, theatricality and emotional import.

The other known playwright represented here is Christopher Durang, who never learned at Yale Drama School how to finish a play. His solution is the same in every play: Bring on a gun and fire it.

In his “The Nature and Purpose of the Universe,” the shooting is preceded by an Agent of God named Ronald, who narrates Durang’s silly fable about, among other things, an outrageous nun who becomes pope and visits New Jersey. It’s almost a “House of Blue Leaves” rip-off--but tightly directed by Laura Viramontes, with a couple of good performances by Ian Jensen as the smug Ronald and an especially funny Sienna Spencer as another Agent of God who pops into the action in various guises, including the tacky nun.

Michael Rangel’s “Afterlife” has an identical hook, with Kurt Jarrard as an angel named Meyer, who screens arrivals in heaven.

Meyer is a smart-ass, but Jarrard’s laid-back performance makes him viewer-friendly and even gets laughs as Meyer deals with Jerry (a fairly wooden Dave Brennerman), a business type upset about unfinished business, and even more upset when Meyer tells him what’s in store for Jerry’s widow and child. It could all be funnier, but Dee Ann Brown’s direction has no clue about tempos, and the staging wobbles back and forth.

The fourth entry seen, “Co Boo,” has a fascinating idea at its core: what really goes on in a hospital intensive care unit. Playwright-director Donna Sindicich, who speaks from experience we are told, has not written a play as much as a pamphleteering stage piece in which the characters talk about how awful their job is, how inhumane and inhuman.

The play is unstructured and has no dramatic fulcrum, but it could be considered a brief note in preparation for a bigger, better play. Sindicich’s minimal direction doesn’t help or hinder good performances by nurses Laura Viramontes, Mary Acuna and Fawne Mcleod.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

* One-Act Festival, Drama Lab Studio, Orange Coast College, 2701 Fairview St., Costa Mesa. Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 5 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Sunday. $5-$6. (714) 432-5640. Running time: 2 hours.

Adam Gubman: Joe

Keith Bennett: Bob

Jeff Marx: John

Ian Jensen: Ronald, an Agent of God

Sienna Spencer: Elaine, an Agent of God

Kurt Jarrard: Meyer

Dave Brennerman: Jerry

Laura Viramontes: Faith

Mary Acuna: Molly

Fawne Mcleod: Toni

An Orange Coast College Repertory production of one-act plays by various authors. “Afterlife,” by Michael Rangel, directed by Dee Ann Brown. Stage manager: Jake Kandel. “Co Boo,” written and directed by Donna Sindicich. Stage manager: Mary Acuna. “4-H Club,” by Sam Shepard, directed by Jeffrey Roma. Costumes/makeup: Erik Lawrence. Stage manager: Laura Viramontes. “The Nature and Purpose of the Universe,” by Christopher Durang, directed by Laura Viramontes. Costumes: Erik Lawrence. Lighting: Tom Schilling, Laura Viramontes. Stage manager: Tina Munoz.