Bad ’n’ good Long trumps short in Sacred and Profane BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	The Sacred and the Profane: A Festival of New Short Plays At NewGate Theatre through June 27.

NewGate Theatre is staging "The Sacred and the Profane: A Festival of New Short Plays." Bell Street Chapel is the appropriate location for this collection of short and very short plays, several of which treat Godly matters in lighthearted fashion. It’s a mixed bag of boisterously well-intended offerings.

Drawing from a pool of new work by local playwrights, a weak line-up of seven shorts before intermission is rescued by three stronger plays that save the evening.

Opening the second half, It’s Called Development, by Anne Phelan, is the best of the lot. Directed by James Robinson, it’s the most consistently well-acted and is better-written than the others.

In black lipstick and blacker garb, Kasparina (Nicole Maynard) welcomes a haughty Amy (Valerie Remillard-Myette) into some sort of inner sanctum, and the edgy banter begins. We know who the boss is when she shows up against a background of diabolical red light and stage smoke. Mrs. Teufel (Carol Caulfield) is a wealthy patron, and Amy is a fund-raiser, the head of the GIG (Giving Is Good) Foundation, protector of orphans. Amy is a smug debutante who considers her privileged life "perfect — everyone should envy me." Of course, her comeuppance is waiting in the wings. We already know about the consequences of selfish behavior, but it is interesting to find out that the Roosevelts’ money came from the opium trade and that John D. Rockefeller’s father was a snake oil salesman.

The closing play is an entertaining ensemble piece, The Passion of the Fluffy, written and directed by Brien Lang. Rashomon-style, we get several versions of what happened during a church Easter pageant. (Actually, the variations are what the participants wish had happened, which probably is a lot funnier.)

The real treat in the piece is Maynard, boppy in bunny costume and big bow tie, fuming and fussing in reaction to the others and wisecracking with some of the best lines of the playlet. "I’ve learned that religion and mythological images don’t mix," says the floppy-earred leader of youth ministry. But we also have fun watching others cavort: Steven Lynch as the one professional actor, all swirling cape and affected accent; Ethan Epstein as a surly egg-throwing high school student; Pamela Lambert as a mom badly in need of meds, clutching an imaginary child; and Jim Brown as a pontificating preacher.

Sandwiched between those two plays is the brief Hurt, written and directed by Joe Mecca, the last of his four brief, related pieces. They all present bedroom frictions between a character played by Marc Berry and several women. In this one, the most successful of the sequence, Valerie Remillard-Myette comes to terms with the unaccountable need she senses, as she always eventually does, to hurt her lover. Not because she wants to, just because it’s time.

Most of the other short plays share the problem of being misconceived and not well thought-out in terms of dramatic or comic payoffs. There is no room in a 10-minute play for its main point to wander off and not be noticed — the dramatic arc has to arrow right home, since we can’t fail to see when it’s missed its target. And if the target is a barn door, even if it’s hit, we’re not impressed.

For example, David W. Christner’s Magnificent Obsession, directed by Lang, entertains but suffers from over-elaborating its obvious message. Raphael (Brown) and Auriel (Lambert) are angels at the end of their vacation in New York City, where they have just been mugged. (Don’t worry — she used her supernatural powers to save them.) He wanted "to experience the pulse of life" again, and as a result now wants to stay, giving up his wings and heaven. Unfortunately, once that decision is made early on, all dramatic tension evaporates, and we’re left with his empty sermonizing (he can’t give up immortality, after all) about loving "this feeling of being alive."

There’s a similar problem with Brian Wallace’s Avant-Garde Porn, directed by Lang. The skit’s basic joke is funny only on the surface: a Brown grad student (Epstein), visiting two former URI friends (Berry and Lynch), tries to turn them on to the erotic implications of some surreal European film imagery. Trouble is, that may be a funny sight gag (I love the bat hat), but the joke is merely conceptual. To really reach us, a gag about pornography has to grab us much lower, after all.

Nevertheless, a pat on the back to NewGate. Off-Trinity theater around here can only be improved with this kind of effort.