Straight talk Aishah Rahman’s stunning one-acts BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Wow. I’ve just seen some of the bravest theater of recent memory, and I see a lot. Perishable Theatre’s Three One Acts by Aishah Rahman takes chances, plays with the possibility of not succeeding, like a politician actually speaking his or her mind. The results are stunning.

The work of Rahman, who is helping to raise another generation of playwrights over at Brown — I suspect she offers a course in courage — was last seen at Perishable five years ago in another world premiere. Only In America put the playwright’s strengths on display, a one-two punch of trenchant imagination and lyrical poetic power.

The last play on the current bill is the lightest — or so it seems at first. In A Lady and a Tramp, Mark Anthony Brown is knee-slap funny as a talkative and staggeringly drunken derelict who imposes conversation on a chic young woman on a Manhattan bus.

Opening night it was performed to the slap bass of Rick Massimo, for apt urban moodiness. (He will alternate with other musicians.) Much of the play proceeds as you’d expect, as an odd couple of strangers who start out wary and scornful and grow into mutual understanding and respect. He challenges her to admit he is real, considering, as he points out, that he is sitting there at eye-level with her crotch — in-your-face reality with bells on.

One hint that things are not as simple as they seem is his name, Psyche, the Greek goddess who personified the soul. The woman is, after all, reading a paperback on the prospect of androgyny eliminating genders, and for a drunk he does come up with precociously illuminating insights on her own psyche. Her name is Opal, she owns an uptown brownstone and lives with a cat and eight plants. Pamela Lambert puts fire in her eyes, making this a fair match. By the time the playwright has the language soaring and the derelict has revealed his real role and the couple are confronting each other’s inner selves, actuality and what-if have merged to powerful effect.

The middle play is as powerful, in a couple of different ways. Fraught with foreshadowing, If We Only Knew follows the last day and moments of Amadou Diallo. As we too well know, he was the African immigrant peddler killed in New York three years ago. He met a fusillade of 41 bullets at his door when a street crimes police unit mistook his reaching for his wallet ID for reaching for a gun. Here he is Aboulaye, a Guinea immigrant, but the specifics remain the same. Randy Ashe plays a bluesy tenor sax and Kevin Gibbs gives narrative commentary as a portrait is painted of a spirited young street entrepreneur, played with energy by Jonathan Mahone.

Rahman’s gift to us here is that she does not take the easy way out with a closing freeze-frame, going to black when Aboulaye/Diallo takes the first bullet. Dramatically, the risk is that poignancy will collapse into bathos. But this playwright has too sure a hand for that to happen. Director Don Mays has the Narrator take his hand, allowing Mahone to remain off-balance, bending backward for the rest of the slow-motion shooting scene. Descriptions, likely out of the autopsy report, makes each bullet quite a harrowing, but necessary, journey. (The play is online at www. temple.edu/chain/rahman. htm.)

The opening piece, Speaker’s Head, doesn’t work as well for me. All but the closing moment is performed in the dark, since it takes place in the mind of the Speaker (Bob Jaffe), a man about to be introduced on a TV show. Gradually we learn that his area of expertise is The Right to Bear Arms, as he speaks of plinking "varmints" and we gradually wonder whether some of these pests might be our own species.

But though Jaffe animates the man, despite being disembodied, I got greedy and wanted more understanding of such a state of mind. The man hasn’t been blessed with cogency or the bursts of lyricism of the derelict above, since the playwright didn’t want to prettify a vicious mind. The consequence is much like the novelist’s problem of conveying a boring character without boring the reader. In this case, his muddled mind doesn’t rise above itself into new context, so what we get we dismiss.

The work of director Mays is mostly transparent, as it should be. I don’t believe that every transition between abruptly changing tones — in the bus ride piece we lurch from poetry to realism — emerged so smoothly from pure acting inspiration. For her part, Monica Shinn’s set design is simple and effective, scattered upright rectangles painted with fragments of urban architecture.

Two out of three successes — and you might love the third one — ain’t too shabby for plays playing without the safety net of conventional structure. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait five years for more from Rahman in her adopted town.