One change from last year’s festival is the switch in venue from the Boston Center for the Arts to the less centrally located Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. (“Tucked away,” Dame Edna’s sarcastic description of the Wilbur Theatre, is more than appropriate here.) The bad news is the cramped space; the good news, unless you’re indecisive, is that the festival now has two stages to play on at once. Pitting festival offerings against each other is an arguably masculine strategy (survival of the fittest and all that), but there seemed to be enough audience members for both stages on the opening weekend.

The festival’s only full-length, multi-character play is Kathleen Rogers’s The Arkansas Tornado, which is helmed by Centastage artistic director Joe Antoun. The bittersweet tale of a roguish country singer (Peter Brown) who tries to reconcile with his ex-wife (Kim Crocker) long after the death of their son, Arkansas fills the quota for Southern-accented plays that seems to be mandatory at these festivals, but it’s directed and acted with a lot more dignity than other works of this type, and Rogers shows a genuine affection for her characters and for their music. (The play includes a lengthy plug for the college-radio program Hillbilly at Harvard.) The cast also includes Korinne T. Hertz, who’s appealing as a rebellious teen, and improv actor Tom Pruneau, who plays a hound dog. Pruneau is a delight to watch as he jumps on furniture and scratches at his fleas — even as the other actors are deep in serious conversation. The Arkansas Tornado proves that the only thing more distracting than a real dog on stage is a good actor playing one.

The other full-length work comes from monologuist Deborah Lubar, who presented an alternate tale of Eden in Eve’s Version at last year’s festival. In Naming the Days, which is directed by Marianne Lust, she plays three women left homeless and alone by the recent civil war in Bosnia. Days begins well, especially when one character talks about life before the war, when there were “normal terrible accidents” like car wrecks. Knowing that Americans see her family and neighbors as nothing but “wagonfuls of victims,” she insists that “we were not born for this.” Unfortunately, this excellent point is almost lost by the end of the play, which, at more than two hours, is far too long. Lubar, who wrote Days after several trips to Bosnia, may have been reluctant to toss out material, but she risks spreading it too thin.

One-acts and sketches make up the rest of the festival, and they’re generally fine. The “Worlds Apart” program includes two works written by Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro and directed by Daniel Gidron, both involving self-discovery on foreign soil. In Mexico City (both the play and the place), a Japanese theater director (Jennifer Sun) embarks on a romance with a British writer (Derry Woodhouse, not entirely rid of his Irish accent) who claims to be “roaming the world in search of barbaric splendor.” The relationship is marked by great sex and escalating tension, and Sun’s character comes to note that men always blame others when things go wrong whereas women always blame themselves. Alfaro’s writing here is witty (as in the comparisons between England and Japan, both island cultures of excessive politeness) without getting too airy. The more obviously comic Sailing Down the Amazon is a monologue featuring Bobbie Steinbach as an 80-year-old actress coping with memory loss and marking the turn of the century with a jungle cruise. Steinbach channels Katharine Hepburn here, but she never crosses the line into shtick. She just has a good time (as we do) with such lines as “I’d rather give him a kidney transplant than have him in my house for a weekend.”

“Two Plays About Desire” begins with Magdalena Gomez’s monologue Chopping (as in “Shopping” with a Spanish accent), which is directed by Dyana Kimball. Speaking to us from her walk-in closet, Gomez talks about bargain-hunting (“We’re all little thieves at heart”), the joys of Yiddish slang and Spanish pronunciation, and body image. (An extraordinarily poised and attractive woman, she refers to herself as “the enemy in the looking glass” and “the stone in the jellybean jar.”) Chopping also explores her relationship with her late mother and with a free-spirited aunt shunned for a lesbian relationship. A confident and graceful performer, Gomez provides an enjoyable hour of humor and introspection.

Deborah Lake Fortson’s Traveling Naked, also directed by Kimball, brings us a married couple (Debra Wise and Doug Marsden) frolicking in the bathtub and wrestling with her pregnancy and his job offer in a distant city. The dialogue here is the closest that the festival gets to overt consciousness-raising, the kind that so easily lends itself to parody. (“When you’re here, I have to move to your rhythm,” says the woman. And, later, crouching into the water, “I want to be married to you. I don’t want to shrink into a wife.”) Fortson succeeds somewhat in avoiding preachiness by putting her protagonist into a tub (yes, both actors are visibly naked) and letting us see her playful sexuality. And this particular staging is helped by Wise, whose movements (such as slithering one leg over the side of the tub to become a “swamp monster”) always seem spontaneous.

“A Night of Quickies,” directed by Sheila Stasack, seemed to be the most popular offering during the festival’s first weekend. It opens with Janet Kenney’s ExtraOrdinaire, a short and slight bit about a man (Peter Snoad) who, faced with the loss of his youth, suddenly wants to become a circus performer. “There is something amazing about an ordinary life,” counters his reluctant wife (Cyndi Geller). Next, Lois Roach’s quietly effective The Emancipation of Mandy and Miz Ellie, set at the end of the Civil War, involves a confrontation between a young black woman (Jessica Chance) and her former slave mistress (Kelly Lawman). It ends with two radically different interpretations of the same event, illustrating a racial gap that persists to this day.

Sheri Wilner’s Relative Strangers, the longest piece in the program, has a young woman (Helen McElwain) whose mother died at childbirth seeking a maternal bond with her airplane seatmate (Cyndi Geller), a cynical older woman on her way to finalize her divorce. (“My husband and I were happy for 20 years,” says the latter. “And then we met.”) Wilner’s play amounts to a screwball comedy without sex, as the young woman becomes only more determined with each rebuff. It’s often quite funny, thanks in part to McElwain’s ability to convey daffiness as something other than stupidity.

Susanna Ralli’s Critique is a tart look at a couple’s different reactions to tragedy (or their different definitions of tragedy). Peter Snoad plays a full-of-himself art critic; Kelly Lawman gives a biting performance as a woman frustrated by his shallowness. (“You truly have a gift for seeing what isn’t there.”) The evening closes, appropriately, with another work by Wilner, Labor Day. At a “white party” to close out the season, one woman is especially reluctant to shed her summer togs for another year. McElwain returns as the central character here, and again her comic timing is a great asset to the play.

Occupying the festival’s “late-night” slot at 10:15 p.m. on Friday and Saturday is The Mrs. Potato Head Show, the latest edition of the comedy revue featuring Margaret Ann Brady, Dorothy Dwyer, and Lucy Holstedt. My biggest complaint is that the show isn’t much more than an hour, and I could watch these performers all evening, but then I have a soft spot for anyone who can capture my elderly Irish relatives so well. Although the show is billed as “A Celebration of Irish-American Woman Being,” there actually isn’t much Irish material in this edition, though Brady does drag as a barfly expounding on “what women want.” Instead, there are sketches about such topics as feminine-hygiene classes (Dwyer distributes to her pupils “a welcome kit to this vale of tears”). There are also some riotously funny songs, including “Nobody Wants To Blow George W.” and a calypso number called “Vagina Dentata” (which the three women muffed on opening night because of bad sound cues, but it worked out anyway). Holstedt, who wrote most of the songs, also contributes “Jessica (More or Less),” an ironic look at the things women do to look attractive. Mrs. Potato Head opens with a wickedly funny attack on the Boston Center for the Arts, former home of the Women on Top Festival. (The pre-show announcement is drowned out by the construction of the Little Bitty Black Box, future home of the Crap in Your Pants Theatre Company.) The smell of burning bridges is nice and pungent on a late winter’s evening in Boston.

The Boston Women on Top Festival continues through March 18. For a complete schedule of events, see “Play by Play,” on page 11.