Little Fish Ends an Era with a “Pick of the Vine” that Harvests New Beginnings

Every January, Little Fish Theatre opens the year with a staging of new short plays culled from hundreds of submissions. But that’s the only way it’s business as usual in 2024, because this “Pick of the Vine” is Little Fish’s last-ever show at 777 Centre Street, the space they’ve occupied for 21 years. And for the first time there’s a unifying theme — one that’s particularly apt.

This year’s slate opens with Robb Willoughby’s The Fence, which finds Terrence (Will Mueller) not showing up for his early-morning work shift for the first time ever. Sussing out the nature of his employment is half the fun. Let’s just say he learns that the sun does not rise and fall based on his day-job. Cute with a dash of clever, and one big LOL care of co-star Shirley Hatton.

For the most part, Ken Presuss’s A Benevolent Alliance of Mourners is stuck in the mire of its own self-importance, with its two characters seemingly in a contest to see who can drop the most wisdom (about coping with death and carrying on). Although a bit of last-minute serendipity injects a modicum of actual feeling, it’s too little too late.

Marsha Roberts’s Black Nun Hoodie has a career counselor aghast at a client’s cluelessness. Samantha Barrios and Tricia Fukuhara do their damnedest to animate their characters, but this one’s pure silly throwaway.

Terry Glaser’s Apastron is certainly the most unique of this “Pick of the Vine” septet, a sort of sitcom episode (there’s a laugh track, one the characters sometimes control with the wave of a hand) that’s an absurdist twist on Héloïse (Ari Hader) & Abelard (Mueller), 12th-century star-crossed lovers who had one of history’s most celebrated epistolary relationships. I can’t tell you how this comes off if you’ve read real-life Héloïse & Abelard’s letters; as someone who hasn’t, I can say that the onstage fictions spout a lot of pretentious gibberish (along with their overgrown baby, Astrolabe (yes, his real name), played Don Schlossman). But I Hader & Mueller’s rapid-fire delivery is on-point, as is Anna Miles’s direction. Bonus points for some fun chalk talk.

Lori Goodman’s Tribal Attire, which features a family of three preparing for beloved Uncle Jack’s funeral, is the emotional throwaway of the bunch, lacking sufficient pathos on the page (genuine pathos, anyway) for the cast to be able to move our hearts.

At first, Safe Harbor, where a Texas doctor (Hatton) is frustrated at every turn by the efforts of the hospital’s lawyer (Barrios) to restrict — in light of an onerous new state law — the doctor’s actions vis-à-vis a patient with a doomed pregnancy, seems like nothing but a vehicle for playwright James McLindon to vent his self-righteous indignation at the post-Roe “pro-life” policies that are all the rage right now. “I am a doctor,” the good doctor yells. “I took an oath!” It’s like bad TV. But a nice little turn at the end makes this the most emotionally affecting work of the night.

Laura Neill’s Juliet Wakes Up is a great closer, imagining a twist of fate that delivers Juliet (Fukuhara) unscathed from her time in the tomb where she reunited with her Romeo (Mueller) and free to reimagine/self-create her future…which might not be a bad thing, after all, because she’s only 13 fucking years old and married the guy after knowing him for just three fucking days. Fukuhara and especially Hader (who plays her cousin Rosaline, whom everyone forgets even though Romeo was in love with her just last week!) are funny and fantastic. Meanwhile, Miles has found the perfect pace for Neill’s wit, as well as adding a hilarious callback to one of the night’s earlier shorts.

Uneven as the program may be, by curating this “Pick of the Vine” around the theme of new beginnings, Little Fish Theatre brings extra levels of meaning and feeling to their last show in the only home they’ve ever known. It’s a fitting goodbye that simultaneously looks toward the possibility of what comes next.

Pick of the Vine at Little Fish Theatre
Times: Thursday–Saturday 8 p.m., Sunday 2 p.m. The show runs through Feb. 4.
Cost: $20 to $30
Details: (310) 512-6030; LittleFishTheatre.org 
Venue: Little Fish Theatre, 777 Centre St., San Pedro 90731