‘Worldly Acts’ Need No Camera

In the advertising world, four out of five doctors is enough. And four out of five plays that are fresh, startling and wickedly well-crafted is enough to highly recommend “Worldly Acts,” five one-acts making their Los Angeles debut at the Tiffany Theater.

The five works are presented by the New York theater company Urban Empire in association with Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All Story, a quarterly fiction magazine blunt about its intention to channel short stories and plays into viable film projects. The evening was first staged last June in New York City.

The Zoetrope connection raises suspicion that “Worldly Acts” will be the stage version of a Hollywood pitch meeting. Luckily, not. The playwrights may not be happy to hear this if they envision a future of Hollywood deal-making, but the most successful entries take such deft advantage of the one-act structure that it’s impossible to imagine them existing as anything else.

The best three are the most deliberately comic: “Boise, Idaho” by Sean Michael Welch, “Daniel on a Thursday” by Garth Wingfield and “Homecoming” by Joe Borini. Although the creations of three writers, they share a comic style that marries an extremely heightened reality with outrageously exaggerated plot twists. For lack of an existing word, let’s call it Zoetropian.

“Boise, Idaho,” an encounter between a stranger and a staid Midwestern couple in a restaurant, not only breaks the fourth wall between actors and audience, it also cheerfully smashes the convention of the invisible wall between onstage narrator and the characters in the drama. “Daniel on a Thursday,” a tense encounter between strangers at a gay bar, is equally effective in upending expectations and features a particularly funny turn by Jack Merrill as Kevin, playing an intricate mind game with startled bar patron Daniel (Scott Paetty). And in “Homecoming,” truth is so much stranger than fiction that it almost triggers a nervous breakdown.

Amanda Beesley’s “The Stolen Child” is the evening’s only serious entry. There’s a brittle tension between Elliot (Mike Weaver) and Ilisha (Lanette Ware) as an affluent couple earnestly seeking to assuage upper-middle-class guilt by making a sojourn to Africa. A more conventional effort than the comedies, but moving and elegantly played.

Then there’s Elizabeth Dewberry’s “Who’s on Top.” How’d this one sneak in? A self-absorbed young couple wax philosophical about love--in a whiny sort of way--while they are opening their wedding gifts. Along with multiple blenders (the functions of which--crush, grind and liquefy--become painfully cute metaphors for lovemaking), they receive a gift of family burial plots. The proposed eternal positioning of the not-yet-deceased sparks a power struggle and commitment fears that threaten to tear them apart. Problem is that Courtney (Daniella Feenix) is so annoying and Michael (Ford Austin) so spineless, you stop rooting for this match long before the act is over. Better for these two to cut their losses, grab a blender and make a run for it.

*

“Worldly Acts,” Tiffany Theatre, 8532 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. $25. Through March 3. Thursdays through Saturdays 8 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m. (310) 289-2999.