5 One-Acts Desperate for Laughs

More than once while watching “Desperate Characters,” the five Dan W. Davis one-acts at Actors Workout Studio, you will suspect that actors--perhaps even these actors--would be able to improvise the scenes better than they were written.

That’s because these are less genuinely fleshed-out one-acts than they are sketch scenes, in which Davis seems in a terrible hurry to get the laughs rolling. All of his hurry results in an evening with few true or funny moments, and it’s easy to imagine how much more exciting, if not funnier, improvs based on these same situations might have been.

The situations themselves are the kind of glib setups that improv thrives on. In the first, “Searching for Splash Barbie,” a nebbishy father named Sam (David Weisenberg) shops for a specific kind of Barbie doll his wife has requested for their daughter, but Sam gets unsolicited “help” from Jack (Evan Fewsmith). This is a world apparently without store clerks, where customers can behave pretty much like Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” and get away with it. Jack, for all his horrific dementia, was much funnier.

In the cleverly titled “When the Water Breaks,” nine-months pregnant Dorie (Francesca Calabresi, replacing Lena Bouton) decides on her own to give birth at home rather than in the hospital, which sets up a situation for over-stressed hubby Ted (James Barry).

Davis is a comedy writer who tends to jump into situations rather than give them an internal logic that would provide comic energy and insight, and this scene is the evening’s worst example of that tendency.

Davis actually seems to be better at drama: “Leon Remembers Everything” is the evening’s only serious section, a morality tale that makes you think for more than a nanosecond.

Software honcho Burt (Fewsmith) thinks he rules the world until Leon (Gary Anello, replacing Chris Cleveland) “accidentally” walks into his office. Though still dramatically crude and a bit obvious, “Leon” imparts a sense of disquieting menace and lurking subtext beneath the hail-fellow-well-met dialogue. Fewsmith and Anello seem grateful they are in the one truly written piece on the bill.

There is one piece set in the San Fernando Valley, “The Hot Dog Stand,” about a sidewalk wiener business that partner Larry (Kevin Foster) is quitting for bigger things. Co-partner Tom (John Colella) cannot fathom why. Selling hot dogs to throngs in the southeast Valley is his life’s dream. Larry points out that there are no throngs, but Davis’ heart is with the dreamer. He comes up with an ending that ruins whatever human sweetness the scene had been building.

“You’ve Got It!” is in ruins from the start. It’s a case, as they used to say about nuclear war overkill, of watching the rubble bouncing. Lester (a physically right Terry Ray) looks more like a mousy accountant than an actor on auditions, but he is in the agency of Mel (an apt Frank Dana) and Lou (Wilson Davis) to get representation. He cannot believe that Mel and Lou think he can be a star, arranging for a show date with Leno and a meeting with Spielberg.

Neither can we. And like so many of Davis’ characters, Lester is less desperate than he is a puppet for shoddy comedy.

The evening’s directors, Tom Seidman and Fran Montano, keep things energetic, and stage manager Allegra Garcia swiftly coordinates several difficult scene changes.

“Desperate Characters,” Actors Workout Studio, 4735 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays 8 p.m. Ends July 31. $12. (818) 506-3903. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.