From the Heart Pat Hegnauer’s Beats of love BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

I love being reminded how simple and yet substantial theater can be. Through April 18 there’s an itinerant production by Pat Hegnauer — founder with Ed Shea of 2nd Story Theatre — that could carry its props and costumes in a single suitcase but fill an arena with the good work on display.

The occasion is Heart Beats, five short plays written and directed by Hegnauer and performed by familiar local actors. Her Living Room Productions is staging it for a short run at Blithewold Mansion. The elegant parlor is the perfect setting for such chamber theater.

The theme common to the 10- to 20-minute plays is love and its absence or aberration, from a couple of surreal variations on how lovers really think and act to an oddly poignant and wry celebration of the death of a mean sonofabitch.

Opening is Murmurs, which cues us into a principal offering of the concise genre: discovering what the relationship is as we watch a conversation unfold. We get permission for voyeurism. Here a man (Rip Irving) and a woman (Alyn Carlson-Webster) are conversing on a deck while his wife, her sister, lies terminally ill inside. We get to make much of very little in such a theatrical game, and since the setting is southern California we suspect that his plying her with brandy implies more than hospitality. I wish that Irving had let us glimpse more of the man’s inner world, but the conversational pas de deux remains interesting.

Fibrillations is set in a hospital waiting room, and here the tension is far more taut as we wonder and discover where these two people are really at. The man under discussion has had a heart attack and Linda (Lara Hakeem) has had to call Sarah (Carlson-Webster), his wife, to his bedside. Is Lara his mistress or fiancé? For days or years? Hegnauer’s writing skill impresses in subtle ways: we know the wife has to lose her temper, but she does so over Linda knowing how she takes her coffee. Strong moment.

Flatlining takes place in the Providence police station, where a detective (Irving) is getting details on a knifing attack from its victim (Luis Astudillo), who sits there clutching his bloodied chest. That this report isn’t being jotted down in a hospital is a clue that this isn’t real in the way we expect. The howling man’s girlfriend, you see, has stolen his heart. He is a banker and she is a painter and this may have been her last resort in trying to get him in touch with his feelings. The detective isn’t exactly Dr. Phil, but he does end up discussing his own survivor story about having his own heart torn out. Their repetitious comic conversation needs tightening up, but I hope one delicious throwaway exchange remains: when the cop asks the bleeding man, to his angry annoyance, how to spell echinacea, we see that a health food store visit is in the offing.

Arrhythmia brings us to the coast of Maine, into a kitchen where a mother and daughter are talking. Despite the light if not light-hearted mood, we learn that they are about to head off to the funeral of their respective husband and father. This is the most ambitious of the playlets here, and the most instructive about how much can be packed into a few dramatic, sufficient minutes. We come to understand how they survived the "mean-spirited" man, in the mother’s description. The daughter learned tunnel-vision self-concern, in an amiable way, and manipulation. The mother (Marilyn Meardon) learned patience and to appreciate the sight of the white sheets he died in flapping on her wash line like sails of a ship to freedom. Nothing over-wrought, though. Carlson-Webster has great timing, awkwardly tugging on panty hose at just the moment she relates that someone thought she looked "queenly."

The last piece, Palpitations, sounds like it couldn’t sustain its premise. The setting is a bustling party. Hakeem is hilarious as a young woman who goes up to an arrogant, posturing man (Astudillo) she is attracted to. He’s obviously a bad boy and bad news, and she’s convinced that she can reform him into a man hopelessly in love with her. She gushes out all the things such a deluded person might understand if she had insight into her hopelessly hopeful and self-destructive behavior. He replies in kind, brazenly saying whatever’s on his mind, all those things that the big head usually prevents the little head from blurting. By all rights, this shouldn’t work outside an eight-panel Jules Feiffer cartoon, but it’s a hoot.

Additional satisfactions in Heart Beats are the thematic segues — from potential illicit love to consequence of such to one result of men withholding their feelings to two ultimate results. Let’s hope Hegnauer and her talented troupe will have more for us in the future.