‘Flashback’ Travels in Time Too Briefly

Two one-acts at the Players Space, “Flashback” is a brief, breezy evening that puffs past you without disarranging your hair. Although performed with a certain brio by the cast, this transitory and thematically disjointed production fails to constitute a full-blown evening of theater.

David Avcollie directs both offerings, which clock in at about 15 minutes each, with an unnecessary intermission thrown in to stretch things out a bit. The opener, “Cowboys #2,” is an early Sam Shepard snippet about two ersatz cowboys who face vultures and death in a sun-baked desert, while the sounds of a modern-day freeway--artfully reproduced by offstage actors--roar nearby.

Before the playlet begins, four cast members draw names out of a hat to determine who will play the two cowboys. (The other two are relegated to mere walk-ons.) As stated in the press notes, John C. Reilly used the same tactic in his Broadway production of “True West.” Here, the ploy seems arbitrary.

Still, Shepard’s absurdist curiosity, which wittily implodes the cowboy archetype and the myth of the American West, holds our interest, if only as an exercise in the themes that Shepard would later explore at greater length.

“Waiting for the Electrician (or Someone Like Him),” an early radio play by the groundbreaking 1960s comedy team, the Firesign Theatre, concerns a woman who goes on an overseas vacation and stumbles into a preposterous and alarming new reality. Timely but insubstantial, “Electrician” offers much befuddlement but few laughs.

Perhaps this is one of the Firesign Theatre’s lesser works, or maybe it’s just that the group’s druggy, cerebralized humor doesn’t time-travel very well. Avcollie and his actors fail to make much of their meager material, which leaves us longing for a bracing dose of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

“Flashback,” the Players Space, 4934 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 10 p.m. Ends March 23. $10. (818) 508-6612. Running time: 50 minutes.