Playing Solitary

With apologies to Three Dog Night, one is not the loneliest number, at least when it comes to current offerings on Orange County stages.

Four one-actor plays open this week. This rare, coincidental onslaught of thespian rugged individualism will occupy the Laguna Playhouse, the Grove Theater Center’s Gem Theater, the Curtis Theatre in Brea and the Grand Central Theater in Santa Ana.

“Fully Committed,” in Laguna Beach, was a long-running, off-Broadway hit in New York and recently closed a six-month run in Los Angeles. The show’s creators, playwright Becky Mode and actor Mark Setlock, drew on their experiences working in a fashionable Manhattan restaurant. Brian Beacock stars as Sam, the harried reservations clerk--and as the 36 other characters who besiege him during his frenzied day. It’s a pinball machine of a play, requiring the actor to bounce from role to role in split-second switches as the likable Sam confronts a bank of ever-ringing phones.

At the Gem, the pace figures to be more relaxed in “Straight Up With a Twist,” Los Angeles actor Paul Stroili’s account of the upbringing that turned him into a “Renaissance geek”--his term for a man who manifests so many feminine quirks and interests that most people might assume--erroneously--that he must be gay. Stroili plays eight characters, but structures the play as a series of monologues rather than attempt the sort of rapid give-and-take seen in “Fully Committed.”

“Late Nite Catechism,” at the Curtis, stars Maripat Donovan as Sister, a nun giving a humor-laced lesson in Roman Catholicism to an adult-ed class. Donovan originated the role eight years ago in Chicago, intending it as a funny but fondly pro-nun rejoinder to such satiric plays as “Nunsense” and “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You.” The show, which relies a great deal on improvised question-answer interplay with the audience, has been playing in Los Angeles for more than a year; Donovan is letting an understudy sub for her at the Coronet Theatre while she weekends in Brea.

The Grand Central offers a Cal State Fullerton production of “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll,” Eric Bogosian’s collection of 11 acerbic monologues. For reasons logistical and artistic, student director Brion Humphrey decided to split the piece between two actors.

“There’s such a proliferation of one-person shows because there’s so little money to put on plays now and such high expenses,” said Nicholas Martin, the veteran director of “Fully Committed.” “But I think one must resist the temptation unless the show is really great.”

For Martin, the key to “Fully Committed” is its sympathetic central character and its structure as an unfolding story rather than a static series of monologues.

“Lots of actors can do a lot of funny voices. That doesn’t make a play,” he said. “If the person [playing Sam] isn’t engaging and kind of simpatico, the whole show doesn’t make sense. You can’t imagine how an audience roots for him.”

In Laguna Beach, it will be up to Beacock to make Sam winning--while also doing justice to the sundry figures who try to boss, cajole, manipulate and otherwise advance their own agendas at his expense. Beacock recently finished a 10-week run--80 performances--playing Sam at the Coronet Theater in Los Angeles.

The rapid-fire character switches make “Fully Committed” a different sort of challenge from a one-actor show like “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll” or Lily Tomlin’s sequence of connected monologues, “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.”

Beacock not only has to remember all the lines in “Fully Committed,” a nonstop, 80-minute show, but he has to remember which of the nearly 40 characters is speaking them.

“It is very intimidating. When I first started doing the show, the phone would be ringing [for Sam to answer] and I would have no idea who it was. I would answer and the [correct] voice would come out. Those were terrifying moments. You know it, but you don’t know you know it.”

Beacock, a boyish-looking but veteran actor of 35, said he never had done impressions or cultivated different characters until about a year ago, when he was cast as the voice of a TV-watching parrot in a Nickelodeon feature, “80 Days.” He did imitations of Jack Nicholson, Robin Williams and others whom the tube-addicted bird mimicked. He said it took weeks of listening to tape recordings of himself reading “Fully Committed” to master the script.

“The good thing about the show is it’s not bells and whistles, not gimmickry,” Beacock said. “A lot of people come away saying, ‘The story really got to me.’ You get to show off the skills” required to create so many different characters, “but you also get to really act.”

This is the second one-actor show this season at the Laguna Playhouse, which last fall presented Julie Harris as Emily Dickinson in a prestigious 25th-anniversary revival of “The Belle of Amherst.”

“We certainly never expected to do two, one-person shows in the same season,” Laguna Playhouse Executive Director Richard Stein said, noting that these are the first singletons in his 11-year tenure. “If anything, we have avoided them. But because [‘Fully Committed’ and ‘The Belle of Amherst’] are entirely different in theme and nature, we don’t see it being a problem. Ideally, they would have been on different seasons, but in the theater business, you have to jump at the chance when the rights are available.”

Paul Stroili, the actor-writer of “Straight Up With a Twist,” thinks that single-actor shows tend to be regarded as guilty until proven innocent.

The problem, the L.A.-based actor said, is that audiences assume the show will be like a stand-up comedy routine, an exercise in egotism, or an unpleasant act of confrontational, therapeutic self-exorcism from the performer-creator.

Stroili (rhymes with “goalie”) defines his main character, based on his own personality, as “a straight guy with the affectations of an arrogant homosexual.” Stroili said he spent his boyhood thumbing through home-furnishing catalogs, putting together “outrageous” outfits for himself, and otherwise becoming immersed in the kind of domestic arcana--such as how to fold a fitted sheet--that usually befuddles men.

“I’ve never seen a football game from start to end, but I can make you a souffle that can make you cry,” said Stroili, who has made his living mainly as an actor in commercials.

He said he didn’t see himself as a character-type capable of resonating on stage until his longtime girlfriend, impressed by how he helped select her wardrobe, remarked about three years ago that “for her, it was like being a female that had a gay best friend she could have sex with.”

Charles Johanson, the Grove’s executive director, went to high school with Stroili in Ridgefield, Conn., and reconnected with him during the Los Angeles run of “Straight Up.” He sees the 75-minute show as a full-fledged play that makes a point by “poking fun at people who need to put labels on everything.”

Maripat Donovan, a Chicagoan and a proud product of a Catholic education from kindergarten through college, said she got the idea for “Late Nite Catechism” by regaling dinner guests with some of the quirkier bits of Catholic doctrine. She was telling them the story of the martyrdom of St. Lawrence as the nuns had related it to her: “The Romans tied him to an iron gate, put him over a fire, and said, ‘Now do you renounce Jesus?’ He said, ‘I’m done on this side, now do you want to turn me over?’ He’s the patron saint of cooks. I’m not kidding.”

Donovan said the story made a strong impression on her as a girl of 7 or 8, because “if St. Lawrence could talk back to the Romans, then I could talk back to the nuns.”

She was acting part time and earning a living as a construction worker when she opened “Late Nite Catechism” in Chicago in 1993. She said it has played continuously there ever since--and that nationwide, “Catechism,” which she wrote with Vicki Quade, has turned into a franchise employing some 20 actresses.

The play aims to be funny while playing against the frequent stage stereotype of nuns as figures of ridicule. “In real life, nuns are exactly the opposite--capable, worldly women who not only take care of themselves, but us too,” Donovan said. She sees Sister as “Someone with a real sense of humor, personality and smarts, someone you want to have come over to dinner when the show’s over.”

And “in a one-actor show,” Beacock said with tongue firmly in cheek, “the cast parties are boring.”

SHOW TIMES

“Fully Committed,” Laguna Playhouse’s Moulton Theater, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Previews today through Friday, 8 p.m. Also Thursday, 2 p.m. Opens Saturday. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Matinees Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. $24 to $41. Ends May 20. (949) 497-2787 or https://www.lagunaplayhouse.com.

“Straight Up With a Twist,” Grove Theater Center’s Gem Theater, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove. Previews Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m. Regular performances Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; April 26 and 29, 8 p.m. Ends May 19. $14.50 to $22.50. (714) 741-9555 or https://www.grovetheatercenter.com.

“Late Nite Catechism,” Curtis Theatre, 1 Civic Center Circle, Brea. Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m.; matinees Saturday and Sunday, 2 p.m. $17 to $27. (714) 990-7722.

“Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll,” Grand Central Art Center, 125 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 6:30 p.m.; matinees Saturday and Sunday, 2 p.m. $10. (714) 278-3371 or https://www.tickets.com.