Do Not Disturb

Reviewed by Rebecca Haithcoat

On the surface, one-acts seem so user-friendly. Instead of two hours’ worth of action, the playwright writes and the audience watches 10 or 15 minutes’ worth. But before you start whipping up your own, remember: you gotta pack a lotta flavor into that small bite.

Joshua Fardon, whose collection of four one-acts is currently running at Theatre of NOTE, doesn’t have a problem packing flavor into his plays. He does, however, have a batch of unbaked ideas on his hands.

Good news is, I’ll take a promising play that just hasn’t been worked-out all-the-way over a dull play any day. The bad news is, a couple of the plays (“Due Diligence” and “Blanks”) fall especially flat. “Blanks” – concerning a wealthy couple who make a proposal to a younger, poorer couple — suffers from being miscast and/or unrehearsed; its Albee-esque quality needs tight delivery and a cast who understand timing. “Due Diligence,” the only boring play of the bunch, suffers from the somewhat pedestrian premise of a young woman being interrogated at dinner by what may be her future father-in-law.

“Soon My Angel Came Again” is a tantalizing little play. John (Kjai Block) has drunk an ancient bottle of some kind of “Divine Enlightenment.” Doing so has produced an angel, who is causing trouble by reading his and his partner’s minds and spouting uncomfortable truths such as “He thinks about Gwen Stefani when they have sex” and “She Googles her ex-boyfriends.” What keeps it shy of being terrific, however, is that Fardon cuts the angel off right when the getting gets good and the audience is salivating over what will happen next.

More developed is “Rise.” Kevin (the excellent Troy Blendell) is a mathematician who’s been blocked over an equation that is his life’s work. An old friend from high school, who’s been stalking-slash-posting on his Facebook wall every day for years, shows up on his doorstep and shakes him up.

With a weaker cast, the play’s main vulnerability — that Fardon seems to lose his footing midway through — might be more glaring. Instead of trusting in the world of magical realism he’s created, Fardon begins adding unnecessary details that muddy the very intriguing conflict at hand. (Yes, he indicates his reasoning for said details early on with the line, “History’s like that. Doesn’t stand up straight, it slouches,” but too many twists and turns, and a play loses its way.)

Still, Fardon dangles a might tasty-looking carrot in front of us. We sense something is off-kilter fairly quickly, but unlike horror movies, we don’t groan at the hero’s stupidity for not immediately recognizing the obvious mass-murderer. Just like Kevin’s, our curiosity outweighs the possible peril.

Of course, it helps that Jenny Flack, who plays an unannounced visitor, is exceptional. Flack is the understudy, but it’s hard to imagine a more perfect actor in the role. Her nuttiness is funny and creepy and charming, all at once.

Theatre of NOTE, 1517 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Hlywd.; Frid.- Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; though May 31. (323) 856-8611, www.theatreofnote.com