Summer snacks NewGate’s ‘Whimsy, Wonder, and Waiting’ (through June 26) BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Snacks. "Whimsy, Wonder and Waiting," the June International Festival of New Plays presented by NewGate Theatre at the Cathedral of St. John in Providence, is a theatrical smorgasbord of little taste treats. Nothing very nourishing, simply morsels offered to satisfy a sweet tooth.

It's an uneven assortment, though. If this were a Whitman’s sampler, we might tend to return some of these confections half-eaten.

There are 11 plays in the festival, but only nine are presented each night, allowing more playwrights to get stage time. The night I attended, things started off on solid footing with Waiting, by John Bolen and directed by Brien Lang. Tension and release, the basic energy source of stage scenes, propels a brief encounter between a desk clerk (Marc Berry) and an old man (Paul Koumrian) who has been hanging around, starting up conversations with people. Harmless eccentric or disturbing loony? Berry makes this enjoyable with a charming naturalness underlying the tension as the conversation evolves into marital counseling.

The other two-person play was 5G 10B, by Michael Griffo and directed by Tom DiMaggio. Douglas (James Kane) and Sister Christopher (Carol Caulfield), the only survivors of a plane crash in the South Pacific, face life and death on a small deserted island. He is HIV-positive, as was his honeymooning partner who didn't survive the crash, and she is professionally positive, being a Catholic nun. But not much comes of their casual conversation, despite the fraught, thought-provoking circumstances, except for survival-induced appreciation of their sea view.

In two other selections death is treated more skillfully, although the characters are children and the brief tales are largely comic. Two preschool kids are as precocious as Schroeder in the Peanuts comic strip in Dennis Schebetta’s Love & Death In the Time of Crayola, directed by Lang. As Mark Gentsch and Sharon Carpentier play the hyper-articulate tots, we get a clever microcosm of the way the grown-up world works, full of love and longing and subterfuge. (Bartholomew is smitten with Sabina, who at age 5 is already an older woman.)

In Child’s Play, by Kolby Granville and Ry Herman and directed by Anthony Victoria, Little Lisa (Rebecca Tavares) is mutely playing with two action figures. She has Mr. Elfy (Chris Rosenquest) and Maraca Guy (Alex Sherba) fight and make up and fend off "the dreaded, dark, evil lord Mr. Scooter." When not acting out her scenarios, the two have their own lives and dysfunctional relationship, which ends up as real as the child’s need for escapism.

Fantasy can get us halfway to a payoff in a short play, but we need more reason to hang around. Neverland, by Kim Kelly and directed by Victoria, accomplishes that by underscoring the need for imagination. Gabby Sherba delightfully plays an eye-rolling 15-year-old who is bored to menace in a Disneyland-like theme park. Steve Lynch is her exasperated father and Rebecca Tavares is a wing-outfitted Tinkerbell, who is either a lunatic or his way out of a miserable life.

However, Circle Line, by Jill Elaine Hughes and directed by Victoria, doesn’t become a fantasy until halfway through, abruptly shifting tone as though the playwright suddenly thought of a funnier play to write. (An anecdote about a haunted mansion is supposed to provide us entry into a surreal ending.) Two couples are bickering while waiting for a train. One of the women (Caulfield) comes up with an imaginative way to test the love of her husband (Jim Brown) — she lies down on the tracks and insists that he rescue her. But the playwright couldn't figure out how to end the piece convincingly and still keep it a comedy.

Too many of these playwrights didn't know how to end their stories; too much casting about for closure is in evidence. Short-form theatrical storytelling can do much better. For all the smiles and laughs prompted by this short play festival, I ended up a little sad. Considering that this competition was not restricted to unproduced plays, the works aren't a promising indication of the level of playwriting craftsmanship out there. After all, they have been culled from more than 300 submissions from all over the country and abroad. (By the way, local playwright Tom Grady’s I Love You, Virus was not staged the night I attended.)

Even given the fact that these were selected as fare for the summer, when theater audiences are regarded as averse to mental nutrition, you'd think that these little plays would provide more than empty calories.