Theatre in Review: The 35th Marathon of One-Act Plays: Series B (Ensemble Studio Theatre)After getting off to a fast start with Series A, this year's EST one-act marathon gets stuck in neutral with Series B. Only two of the quartet of plays on offer prove engaging, and each of them could use a second look. The title character of John, Who's Here from Cambridge (probably the best of the four), is a PhD candidate in political science who suffers from cerebral palsy. He hires a young woman named Jess to be his caregiver. John is from money and a Harvard graduate; Jess is definitely working-class. (She takes mild umbrage when he expresses surprise that she has been to college.) On the job, they grow closer; in the most remarkable sequence, she silently washes him, a mundane activity that beautifully expresses their enforced intimacy. (The scene is well handled by the director, Nick Leavens.) Just when it looks as if romance might blossom between them, the playwright, Martyna Majok, throws in an O. Henry twist that proves deeply satisfying. Still, the play as it now stands seems to end before it gets started; I wonder if there isn't a longer piece inside it. Anyway, it's refreshing to see a character with CP presented as sexually active and desirable, and Gregg Mozgala and Paola Lázaro-Muñoz play together with a thoroughly believable offhand charm. There's also amusement to be had in Cora and Dave are Getting Older, which focuses on a married couple in their late thirties getting ready for bed. Actually, Dave is half asleep; most of the play consists of Cora nattering on, expressing her hero worship for another couple, Abby and Tim, who have just hosted them for dinner. Cora marvels at their politically correct vacation destination. The Seychelles "doesn't have a native population, so there's no native population to exploit." She adds, "Did you know it took them 26 hours to get there -- with two layovers? Can you believe it? But it was worth it, because their consciences were clear the whole time they were there." Dave is remarkably tolerant of this nonsense until Cora works herself into an abject state, feeling thoroughly inadequate, and he quietly drops a bombshell that makes her look at her own life through new eyes. Julia Cho, the best-known playwright on the bill, supplies some tasty comic dialogue, but the piece is overextended and, in the last analysis, a little too thin and obvious. It is, nevertheless, deftly directed by Marcia Jean Kurtz, and engagingly played by Dawn McGee and Jack Sochet. We Can All Agree to Pretend This Never Happened is one of the odder things to come my way in some time: It's a sex farce about climate change, set in a research lab in Siberia. Andrew, the nebbishy project manager, worries that his wife, Liz, the head scientist, is cheating on him with the unseen Boris, he of the bad dental work. Andrew confesses his fears to Lincoln, Liz's assistant. In fact, Liz has slept with Lincoln, but her big secret is that she and Maya, the lab technician, have fabricated a virus in an attempt to draw attention to the pernicious effects of global warming. These two plot lines collide in ways that are always awkward and never funny. Under the direction of Abigail Zealey Bess, the four-person cast -- Jonathan Randell Silver, Polly Lee, Shyko Amos, and Mike Smith Rivera -- run around looking frantic, as if they have just checked into Feydeau's Hotel Paradiso, but the effort is for naught. This is not a case of a playwright (Emma Goidel) putting her best foot forward. The most ambitious piece, The Hour of All Things, is, sadly, the most tedious. A monologue, it begins with the protagonist, Nic, saying, "Last week/Last Thursday/To be exact/I was standing/Waiting/In a queue at the supermarket/When I started to think/About the history of radical progressive liberal politics/In Western capitalist and late capitalist democracies,/And I started to cry/Right there/In checkout lane number seven." No, this is not a parody by Christopher Durang; it is an intensive inventory of one vaguely drawn woman's angst. We hear how she soils a variety of grocery items with her tears. She frets about global capitalism. She recalls childhood panic attacks. As an adult, she staves off anxiety by counting. She joins a protest march of some sort and is alarmed to have fallen in with a band of anarchists. She is tear-gassed and put in a holding cell. The piece climaxes with a parable about a beautiful land that is despoiled by some of its inhabitants, while other wise souls "only knew that one day/A record of shame would mark the land/After that, there would a flood of tears/And this flood would drown all." Caridad Svich's script practically vibrates with sensitivity; unfortunately, self-importance is part of the package. It isn't about the evils of the world; it's about how bad Nic feels about the evils of the world. That's something different and far, far less interesting. Under William Carden's direction, Miriam Silverman does everything possible with the role of Nic, but the script offers her an uphill climb. Series B retains Nick Francone's set design, Greg MacPherson's lighting, and Audrey Nauman's costumes, all of which are solid; Julian Evans' sound design includes a variety of effects, including cracking ice, a song by Tom Waits, and Frank and Nancy Sinatra singing "Something Stupid." As always, it's fun to see what's cooking at EST, and the company is loaded with some fresh young acting faces. Still, fingers are crossed that Series C will prove more fruitful. -- David Barbour 
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