Double the fun Girl on Girl is a laugh riot BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Girl on Girl, two short plays by Stephen Karam, is what is known in technical theater terms as a laff riot. The concluding performance in the Brown/Trinity Playwrights Repertory Theatre summer season (on July 30) makes no attempt to edify us but nevertheless teaches a good lesson in how well-executed comedy is killingly funny.

Which is not to say that all this hilarity bypasses the brain on the way to the funny bone. Anyone in love with language, or even suffering an occasional crush, will enjoy the wordplay and word warfare engaged in here.

Mister Murdery, the first of the two one-acts, starts out on a dark and stormy night. We are in Citytown General Hospital with Nurse Silver (Darius Pierce), a bearded woman, and Nurse Cherry (Jessie Austrian), an attractive new member of the two-person staff. Cherry has little medical experience but plenty of soap-opera-nurse cleavage to compensate. She has come from the nearby ethnic enclave off Citypueblo, emerging only "half-bilingual," as Silver puts it, and convinced that "martini" is a Spanish word that describes heartburn.

The murder mystery of Mister Murdery involves figuring out who killed three residents of Citytown (Pop. 5), knocking off the entire lesbian population, including half of the police force. Nurse Cherry sorrowfully imagines the lesbians exclaiming, "Ouch! . . . Ouch!" � adding that they would have done so in a lower voice. Part of this romp is a goof on theatrical suspense itself, with glass breaking off-stage occasionally, accompanied by requisite gasps and grimaces.

We get sporadic updates from a radio, including droll asides such as "Those of you who just tuned in have missed what I just said." The radio voice is actually a third character, deflating the tension with pressure-relieving inanities, much like media�s welcomed purpose in real life. There are plugs from its sponsors, such as eerie silence and English: "English � the only language worth speaking."

The second short play is The Principal and the Pee, a companion piece set in an equally beset Citytown General High School. In this slightly more complicated case, it is the lesbians who are doing the threatening. Principal Pee (Pierce) assumed his administrative position eight months after the death of his twin brother, the previous principal. A board-appointed new principal (Brian Houtz) eventually shows up for a showdown.

Once again, the opening mise en sc�ne, with emphasis on the misery, is an inkblot test for the playwright that he whips into animation. The principal is looking out the window at students he is making stay there for their winter break. No, they are not happily making snowmen, he is informed; those are the students. He has armed the janitors and instructed them to fire at any students who look like they might have guns. He also has them perform a daily ritual of peeing a line in the snow around the school, which has successfully kept any SWAT teams from invading their territory.

Here the lesbian threat is posed by Lizzy (Lucy DeVito), who unabashedly kisses girls on the playground, and by her chichi/woo-woo mother, the Hot PTA Mom (Austrian), and they make quite the Dynamic Duo. (Does �02 Brown grad Karam have a TV pilot in the drawer, kinda Xena: Warrior Princess meets Gilmore Girls?)

All the actors here not only locate the kooky kernels of their characters but also, to maintain the metaphor, find out how much heat makes them pop. My favorite discoveries include DeVito�s adolescent exasperation at the dysfunctional adults ("So messed uh-up") and the entitled way Pierce�s power-mad Pee figures that since he is a principal this must be his principality.

Under the Billy Wilder-snappy direction of Lowry Marshall, the breakneck pace and curveball dialogue is typified by the following exchange between him and his assistant (Crystal Finn). "What else today?" he asks. "You forgot your mother�s birthday," she says. "The card�s in the mail," he replies. "Thank you, son," she says.

This is the 21st century, so by now history and pundits have instructed us in every opinion we should have, at least twice. Therefore, this play is entirely subtext, humorous only to those who think gender bias absurd. A danger sign of not taking some attitudes for granted is insightfully described in the program, quoting Tony Kushner: "Tolerance has its uses, but not all of them are good. It seems to me that frequently when people are asked to tolerate one another, something is wrong that Tolerance won�t fix."

I�ve missed the annual treat of Brown summer theater, which wasn�t offered last year. Thank goodness it�s back.