Fringe benefits Small companies consider big issues BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

Palestinian suicide bombers who fail to fulfill their mortal missions. Irish immigrants whose grief over the loss of a child evokes the misery and the horrors of their heritage. A teenage gangster who gets burned by his smooth talk. They all make appearances in the eight one-act plays that make up the inaugural Boston Fringe. The area’s "underground" companies may be fringe, but their works take you to the core of hot political situations in a more intrepid, full-throttle way than you might expect of the area’s larger theaters.

With the emergence of new companies each year and the increased availability of alternative performance spaces, among them the Cambridge Family YMCA’s Durrell Hall and Jimmy Tingle’s Off Broadway, Boston has spawned a mushrooming underground theater scene. Boston Fringe is the brainchild of Company One, whose past productions have include plays with political undertones. Company One invited six other companies to participate in the festival, whose two alternating programs offer something old, something new, something borrowed and something Blue. (As in Brother Blue, the legendary storyteller, who appears as a special guest at designated performances.)

For "old," there’s New African Company, a group begun in 1968 by Boston University theater professor James A. Spruill with Gustave Johnson. Its Love Jones, the festival’s only single-character piece, shows how life in an urban ghetto can lead a teen who’s just out to survive (and get a little play while he’s at it) to make choices that spell ruin. Under Vincent Siders’s intense direction, Keith Mascoll plays a young gangsta trying to sweet-talk a "sweet butter kind" of woman. He spews the cultural references in John Adekoje’s script like smoke from a flame to prove his cool. But flames leap when circumstances spin out of his control, and he lunges in your face when fear overtakes him. Adekoje has a sharp ear for the glib vulgarities of speech and thought characteristic of kids out to prove their gangsta slickness, and Mascoll glides from cockiness to terror to the unexpected finish.

Centastage has focused on developing new scripts since its founding in 1990, and its offering of Kathleen Rogers’s Ballast is a sample of the socially complex works the group cultivates. Under Joe Antoun’s evenhanded direction, Linda Carmichael and Steve Auger give affecting performances as an Irish couple whose grief over their young daughter’s death has rammed their marriage up against a wall. In 20 quick minutes, you get the shattered pieces of their relationship and a glimpse of how they might bail themselves out.

These are new works by older companies; it falls to younger troupes to give familiar scripts a contemporary ring. In its debut performance, Tricord Productions adapts Ntozake Shange’s 1975 for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, fusing it with poet Keith Antar Mason’s for black boys who have considered homicide when the streets were too much to create Inner City Blues, a he-said, she-said patchwork about black urban iniquities. It’s a vibrant piece that incorporates dance and slam poetry, evoking everything from Alvin Ailey’s soul to contact!’s ability to tell a story in movement to Suzan-Lori Parks’s blunt musings on race.

Zeitgeist Stage Company contributes The New World Order, a short Harold Pinter piece in which a blindfolded man (Chuck Gale) sits pigeon-toed in a chair while two smarmy victimizers (John Joyce and Jason Beaubier) taunt him. Director Darren Evans keeps the tone suitably cryptic but doesn’t tap the sexual currents Pinter means to convey.

Company One’s two-part Before My Eyes, which is part of both programs, provides the borrowed element. The works are made up of monologues taken from interviews published in Harper’s last year both with Palestinian would-be Shaheeds who abandoned their suicide missions when they saw the innocents they would murder and with Israeli soldiers serving in occupied territory. In each installment, the performers communicate the subjects’ moral doubts and confusions through eloquent body language as well as in words. As a soldier in Hebron, Mason Sand relates how killing doesn’t allay hate but rather stirs apathy while expressing a different subtext with jittery fingers.

Boston Fringe, which also includes performances by Mill 6 Theatre Collaborative and Hysterical Performances, continues at the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont Street in the South End, through November 22.