Stage Reviews : ‘Pasquini’ Tops List at One-Act Festival

BEVERLY HILLS —  The gem of Theatre 40’s fourth annual Festival of One-Acts is Sam Ingraffia’s “Pasquini the Magnificent,” beautifully directed with restraint and understanding by Ricardo Gutierrez. It’s the final play in Series B, the second of two separate programs.

Milt Kogan is exceptional as Pasquini, an aging magician appearing for the first time since a stroke two years earlier, before a convention of wholesale meat distributors. There is a sense of loss in his every move and intonation, aggravated by a desperately aggressive entertainment chairman (Jerry Beal), and soothed only by Pasquini’s bittersweet meeting with a distributor’s wife (Rachel Davies) who is trying to heal her own sense of loss. Fine performances by all three make some of the magic Pasquini himself can’t.

Preceding “Pasquini” in Series B is Steve Patterson’s “Deuces,” directed with fine panache by Stewart J. Zully to match the fireworks of the writing. In the back room of a Mardi Gras strip joint, Orville (Jonathan Fuller) is ready for the last card game of the evening. His assistant Dora (Sarah MacDonnell) ushers in a typical tourist couple (Marek Johnson, David Hunt Stafford), masked and hungry for adventure. What they don’t realize is that the stakes of the game will squeeze their marriage until it screams, and leave them only the masks they’ve always worn with each other. All performances, particularly Johnson’s as the distraught wife, are excellent.

Series A is the lesser of the two evenings, but two out of its three plays fare well.

The most impressive is P. J. Barry’s “Nantucket Sleigh Ride,” directed with finesse and great dollops of humor by John Camera. The title refers to the journeys in small boats by whalers who have harpooned a whale, but it’s used here as a metaphor for the ride parents take when their kids begin to grow up. Jenny (Stacey Stone) is giving her therapist Sarah (Marianna Harris) as much of a ride as she gives her divorced parents. But her rough relationship with her father (James Bartz) is less important to Barry’s point than the swift switch in attitude the therapist makes when her own daughter reaches the dangerous age Jenny is just leaving. Stone’s volatile teen-ager highlights the piece.

Robert Shaffron’s “The United Way” glances at the workings of the minds of a couple of self-deceiving advertising account executives as they try to come up with a slogan for an upcoming United Way campaign. K. C. (Christopher Michael Moore) is the hustler of the two, grasping at every cliche; Roger (Chip Heller) practices a sort of copywriter’s Zen technique, waiting for inspiration. An illegal alien, delivering coffee from the local deli, gives Chip what he wants, with his story of a hazardous journey from Russia with infant son. The humor comes from Jill C. Klein’s crisp direction, Heller’s blase complacency and the equally touching and funny buoyancy of Daniel Leslie’s immigrant.

Charles Otte’s kinky direction does what it can to help Richard Keller’s kinky “Lucky Dog,” but the playwright has written himself into a corner without an ending. Good, kinky performances by Bill Erwin, as owner of a pet food store, Harry Singleton as his misshapen assistant, and Dorothy James as a hapless customer, begin to seem lost when Keller doesn’t fulfill the promise of mystery and satire.

* “Theatre 40 One-Act Festival,” Theatre 40, Beverly Hills High School, 241 Moreno Drive. Series A: tonight-Sunday, 8 p.m. Series B: Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sunday, 2 p.m. Ends Sunday. $10; (213) 466-1767. Running times: Series A, 1 hour, 40 minutes. Series B, 2 hours.