Young Playwrights Unafraid to Tackle Some Age-Old Issues

“A Night Out With Young Playwrights” at the 2nd Stage features two winning entries from the Blank Theatre Company’s annual Young Playwrights Festival.

The two teen-penned playlets, which deal with adolescent sexuality and gender confusion, are precocious, earnest and sentimental to a fault. Not that youthful artists should court disaffection, but both plays often verge on vintage Hollywood potboilers, interspersed with the kind of dialogue that flowed trippingly from the tongues of Rock Hudson and Lana Turner. Full of conscious camp and unconscious melodrama, these are florid, formless efforts by writers not yet fully in control of their craft.

The opener, “Boy,” by Beth Bigler, is a thematically limited but consistently appealing comedy-drama about a nameless Girl (Melissa Caulfield) who dismays her overly protective parents (Mary-Pat Green and Warren Davis) when she develops a crush on her sexually precocious fellow teen Ella (Jill Ritchie). Under the capable direction of Jessica Kubzansky, the actors are seamlessly funny--and the baby-faced Caulfield packs a surprising emotional punch under her adolescent confusion.

Joshua Levine’s “Starry Night,” directed by Daniel Henning, is equally watchable but considerably less dramatically focused, despite Henning’s thoughtful and specific staging. Detailing the star-crossed love between two gay college students, Ron and Jordan (Erik Anderson and David Tuchman), the play seesaws between the arch and the cloying. Without sufficient setup, a tacked-on tragic ending is engineered for topicality rather than credibility.

Domenica Cameron-Scorsese is amusing and lushly attractive as Jordan’s yuppie gal pal, Nina. But Jonathan Messer and Kent Linville, who play Ron’s flamboyant and straight--respectively--best friends, are misplaced in Levine’s desultory narrative.

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* “A Night Out With Young Playwrights,” 2nd Stage, 6500 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Oct. 16. $17.50. (310) 289-2999. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.