Although COVID threw things out of joint, it’s fair to say that for over 20 years now each January Little Fish Theatre has opened its season with “Pick of the Vine,” an evening of short plays selected from hundreds of submissions. This year’s iteration is one of the quickest yet — seven plays totaling less than 90 minutes. And it goes something like this….
As usual, “Pick of the Vine” opens on the lite side. Ebashi’s Not Just a Phase features a wife and mother of two (Pantea Ommi Mohajer) wanting a divorce because she’s fallen in love…not with another man…not with another human…but with a chair. Specifically, a 1-year-old, Chinese-made display chair in a furniture store — “him,” not “it,” because “Who are you to decide another’s pronouns?” And although her husband (Michael Mullen) protests, it turns out that his wife is far from the only one with a furniture fetish.
Initially, Rebecca Kane’s Safe Walk seems a bit of a meander about a meet-up between a female college student (Kirsten Hansen) and her less-than-expert volunteer campus escort (Javon Willis). But in the end we’re reminded that Black men have their own reasons to feel unsafe by themselves. There’s a nice idea at its core, but there was a more compelling way to bring it home.
Robin Berl’s Inner Child Work is a strange one. A grown daughter (Bouket Fingerhut) invites her mother (Mohajer) over for an “experiment” (her word) to see whether they can increase empathy for each other through reliving an incident from her childhood, except with the roles reversed. What and how this transpires makes sense only in a magical realist sort of way, but Fingerhut and Mohajer are impressive in how they live these transformations. I’m not sure it all works on the page, but the acting turns this into maybe the most satisfying work “Pick of the Vine” has to offer this year.
Brett Hursey’Hang-Ups is a little bit clever. Ted (Adam Fried) and Selena (Fingerhut) have been dating for two months. He’s a high-strung CPA, and she finally shares what she does for a living: phone ex. No, not phone sex: phone ex. For a fee, you see, she takes calls from men who want to stay in touch with the women who’ve rejected them, or something like that. That’s not really the clever bit; the final twist (and how the title fits) give things a little boost.
Jennifer O’Grady’s Sugar is an overly earnest, awkward attempt to be pithy about battered women helping each other, and it’s a bit superfluous in getting there. ‘Nuff said.
Lovers & Survivors, a three-parter by Aaron Leventman, starts us off in the late 1960s when a pair of bullied junior-high loners (Mullen and Fried) meet for the first time in the cafeteria and bond over the bad tater tots and how “cool-looking” Paul McCartney. They — and we — easily translate the coded message in the latter. Right then and there they resolve to ditch P.E. to sneak into a screening of Rosemary’s Baby. When we next encounter the now longtime friends it’s the ‘80s, and one of them has AIDS. Things seem dire, but there’s a third part, so…. It’s all a bit too on-the-nose, but no doubt many will be touched.
Closing the show is W.L. Newkirk’s Bingham’s Ledge, where two strangers (Willis and Fingerhut) arrive at the same time to jump to their doom. Beyond a lifetime dearth of romance and a blind, dying cat, we never learn much about him, but she’s a chatty fireball blazing a trail deep into the Asperger’s spectrum (my diagnosis) with a royal mess of a life in which she was kissed only once — and that was on a dare. Newkirk has penned what is far and away the funniest line of the entire program, and his quiet, ambiguous ending was the right way to bring this “Pick of the Vine” to a close.
Pick of the Vineat Little Fish Theatre
Times: Thursday–Saturday 8 p.m., Sunday 2 p.m. The show runs through Feb. 5.
Cost: $20 to $30
Details: (310) 512-6030; LittleFishTheatre.org
Venue: Little Fish Theatre, 777 Centre St., San Pedro 90731