Fringe benefits The Boston Theater Marathon; Shouting Theatre in a Crowded Fire; An Evening of Havel BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

In 10 hours, you can fly from Boston to Portugal and back. You can watch the entire first Star Wars trilogy and still have time get to the cineplex and catch Revenge of the Sith. You can pop 140 bags of microwave popcorn in succession. Or you can spend the day at the annual Boston Theatre Marathon (Sunday May 22), where the hairpin turns take you from the comic to the tragic to the sappy to the inane. Now in its seventh year, the popular event moved from cramped quarters at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre to two larger and more lavish theaters at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts. Unlike the legions who arrived with picnic bins and stocked Tupperware, I came armed only with two pens and my pledge to sit through the entire epic event: 10 hours of 10-minute plays by New England playwrights, each presented by a different New England theater company. (For the record, most of those snack-toting folks stayed only three or four hours. Lightweights.)

Around the fourth hour, it occurred to me that playwrights are like politicians. Some take a well-worn theme and give it a fresh spin; some even inspire new ways of thinking about it. Others take a trendy or intriguing issue and dance around it; they’re skilled stylists, but they never crack the surface. Still others make characters transform in a small slice of time and leave an impression akin to that of an effective political speech. Examples of the last group were few and far between at this year’s marathon. But the plays that hit their targets hit them hard, thanks to precision plotting and zingy dialogue.

The opening hour offered some hot-air balloons, plays full of self-importance and lofty themes. Just as well Hortense Gerardo’s In the Wake of the Horsemen (Playwrights’ Platform) kicked off the marathon, since it was out of the way quickly. An American aid worker who feels drawn to go back to the Sudan insists to her husband that her motivations are more spiritual than the guilt he assumes she feels. Joyce Van Dyke dealt with guilt — or the lack thereof — more cleverly in The Earring (New Repertory Theatre), in which Bobbie Steinbach played a Russian hotel maid who finds a diamond earring and schemes to give it to her ne’er-do-well son.

The American Repertory Theatre paraded its star power early in the day with Beacham’s Last Poetry Reading, a nugget by Robert Brustein, who also appeared as an aged, liquor-sodden poet quoting legendary bards’ homages to nature. When the noise and the mess of modernity invalidate the poets’ words, he spirals into a potty-mouthed tribute to lewder delights, with the help of his foul-mouthed Tourette’s-afflicted wife.

By the fourth hour, I’d been sitting long enough to view a full-length play and was ready for a few laps around the block. Fortunately, the next group curbed my wanderlust. Joshua Rollins’s The Amazing Adventures of Captain Normal (Súgán Theatre Company) was an Incredibles-inspired number about jaded suburban guys who start a crimefighting superhero brigade. Candace Perry’s Sorry (Wheelock Family Theatre) dealt with an everyday hero, a young soldier felled in Iraq, whose situation is channeled through her mom’s guilt-laden dream. The dialogue was cliché’d, but director Susan Kosoff overcame that with her rendering of the mother-daughter relationship.

The next two hours were crammed with the goofy-joke-stretched-thin-as-dental-floss. Peter Shelburne’s Gus Penelope Syberson (Theatre Cooperative) centered on a couple drawn together by a GPS with human qualities and motivations. R. Brad Smith’s The Lemonade Stand at the End of the Earth (Shadowboxing Theatre Workshop) unfolded as three men dangled from belays, their mountain quest for the holy grail of citrus having gone awry.

Around 6 p.m., the crowd thinned. This was Heartbreak Hill — or just dinnertime. Too bad. Deserters missed some chestnuts. Two middle-aged Southern women meet in a Northern city and bond over their dogs and botched relationships in Rebecca Saunders’s He Looks like a Burrito (SouthCity Theatre Company). The end hit like a left hook, revealing that one woman is the one the other’s husband left her for. Ed Bullins’s Black Caesar (Our Place Theatre Project) shook up the theater with a child’s feisty imaginings of a Harlem Renaissance choreographer. (And helped me blink the glaze off my eyes.)

Ten minutes seems a long time after eight hours of such installments. When are they going to start passing hors d’œuvre, I wondered. Enter John Kuntz in a drab dress to pose as the delusional cereal-box-collecting housewife of his John Waters–esque Kix (Nora Theatre Company). More sentimentality — dead fathers, skulls of dead baseball legends, mentally ill brothers — led to a wacky finale from the Jewish Theatre of New England. Richard Schotter’s The Spot starred Jeremiah Kissel and Ken Baltin as middle-aged buddies in search of the full spiritual benefit of an impending lunar eclipse.

Andy Warhol promised us all our 15 minutes of fame. The Boston Theater Marathon gives just about every area theater company its 10 minutes. And though performing in a 350-seat theater is no milestone for a large regional company, it probably constitutes a thrill for smaller troupes used to no-frills, off-the-beaten-path venues.

But rare is the writer, actor, or director who gets his name on a major marquee before taking a rigorous run through the mill of the fringe. The smaller playhouses that are part of this track provide intimate settings where we can hope — if not expect — to find works that shatter conventional theatrical molds, plays that scoff at the commercial demand for razzle-dazzle puffery and formulaic stories, scripts that plant the seeds of political provocation and tantalize with challenges to what we hold true. This isn’t too much to expect. Consider how Bertolt Brecht refined his epic style in the Berlin underground. Or how, in the 1950s and ’60s, the Living Theater steered the nascent fringe bandwagon, eschewing theater as escapism for a radical performance style intended to broadcast political defiance.

That idea evidently appealed to director Wesley Savick as he was cultivating his interest in theater during the Vietnam era. It’s his fascination with the idea of theater as a means to political change that’s explored in Shouting Theatre in a Crowded Fire (at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre through June 5), a meta-style affair that blends earnest editorial, political parody, and historical re-enactment to make an appeal for action against the policies of the Bush administration. The socio-political tone of Savick’s theater piece, which is getting its world premiere, is inspired by the work of writer/activist Howard Zinn. In fact, a more suitable title might be The World According to Zinn, as the play’s five actors quote liberally (if you will) from his leftist texts.

There are two noble causes at work here. Savick aims to pay tribute to Zinn and to illustrate the mutual influence of life and art: one must act up in society, just as actors do on stage, to instigate change. Thus Savick plays himself, giving instructions and asking for scenes from the top, pounding home the idea that a theater director’s job is analogous to the president’s power to direct the nation.

But the premise that the five young actors are making these discoveries for themselves is a thin veil for Savick’s autobiographical musings. Despite its effort to demonstrate the importance and influence of Zinn, the Living Theater, and the likes of Arthur Miller and Clifford Odets, Shouting Theatre comes across as a solipsistic exercise carried out with smug righteousness. That’s because the evening is channeled through Savick’s reminiscences of discovering both these artists and the potential of the stage as a political pulpit. For all its incendiary ambitions, the show flounders in a bog of nostalgia. Sure, there are parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, but it’d be more engaging to learn what Savick and his young performers have to say about the latter than to hear them recount how artists addressed the former in the 1960s.

At one point, a character in Shouting Theatre asks, "If an old play is celebrated as relevant, aren’t we mourning the fact that it’s no longer necessary?" That somewhat convoluted question impressed itself on me, since I’d just seen An Evening of Havel (presented by Molasses Tank Productions at Charlestown Working Theater through May 28). Like the works of the Living Theater, those of playwright (and first president of the Czech Republic) Václav Havel are anchored in their time and place: Communist-ruled Czechoslovakia of the late 1960s and ’70s. So to see a pair of Havel’s absurdist one-acts, Unveiling and Audience, performed in a contemporary context is to deduce that Molasses Tank Productions puts Havel on equal footing with Shakespeare in terms of timelessness.

Unveiling shows us an image-conscious couple crowing about their status symbols and idealized lifestyle to a working-class friend; Audience focuses on a brewery foreman who drunkenly yammers about the dangers of surveillance to an employee. But Havel’s importance as a playwright rests in his dissidence in the face of a repressive regime and in his experimental forms, not in his literary merits. To remove his work from its context weakens it, not to mention throwing the audience for a loop because of all the allusions to Communism. To reset these works in the present makes Havel’s absurdist sensibility appear ridiculous. And that defies the spirit of fringe.