For the Phoenix, the third annual Boston Theater Marathon was more of a relay, with the baton being passed from critic to critic every few hours. Over the course of 10 hours, the three of us saw 40 10-minute plays written by 42 authors and presented by 41 theater companies performing on two stages of the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, which annually presents the event in conjunction with that other Boston marathon. This year’s theater marathon was dedicated to the late critic and director Skip Ascheim, whose passion and intelligence are deeply missed on the local rialto. Proceeds ($13,000) will benefit the Theatre Community Benevolent Fund, Inc., a nonprofit charity that was brought into existence to aid Ascheim and that continues to provide emergency funds for members of the theater community who suffer catastrophic loss.

Ten hours sounds like a long haul, but the marathon, presented in one-hour installments, zips by. Here’s the rundown on the most interesting entries from this annual cornucopic picnic of theatrical tapas — all of it organized and served up with military precision by artistic director Kate Snodgrass and her crack BTM team.

AS THE WORLD TURNS (Wellfleet Harbor Actors’ Theatre)

Written by Howard Zinn and directed by Wesley Savick, this play incorporates almost every issue on the people’s professor’s mind: a screed at government-sanctioned behavior in ’Nam, a plug for euthanasia, and a good-bro/bad-bro conflict that endows the baddie with sensitivity and feeling in contrast to the sibling who sells out. In case your attention flags, there’s also a lost love between bad bro and, you guessed it, good bro’s wife.

— IF

BLAH! BLAH! (Rough & Tumble Theatre Company)

One of the most enthusiastically received marathon entries, this collaboratively developed work amounts to a staged silent movie. The dialogue is limited to two words, one indicated by the title, the other by the phrase “yes” men. We first meet George K. as a smiling face among sullen commuters on a train. At work, where his boss is a tyrant and his co-workers are toadies, he drifts into a Walter Mitty–like reverie about sweeping a beautiful woman off her feet. As directed by Dan Milstein, Blah! Blah! boasted imaginative staging and a sweet sense of humor. And the bouncy keyboard accompaniment would have made Buster Keaton feel right at home.

— RDS

CLAUDE AND CLAUDETTE (Pilgrim Theatre)

Kim Mancuso directed John Andert’s soulfully amusing goof on French cinéma, which comes complete with an on-stage accordionist to supply lugubrious music and spoken subtitles. The matching-bathrobe-clad title characters (Susan Thompson and Kermit Dunkelberg) exchange soul kisses, cigarettes, and moody conversation, in a mix of French and accented English, about a crisis in the village involving Jacques and “Jeel.”

— CC

CRITICS’ CIRCLE (Súgán Theatre Company)

Kate Snodgrass’s play, which she also directed, takes the theme of “There’s No Business like Show Business” to portray those dreadful moments when actors and playwright first read the reviews of a new play. The jokes about critics ripped trippingly off the tongues of Boston theater’s first lady, Paula Plum, and husband Richard Snee, her ex-husband in the play; then there were the sight and sound gags about his new cookie (Breanna Pine). Robert Pemberton was the desolate playwright in love with Plum’s diva in this knowing, funny vignette from Snodgrass.

— IF

DAY EIGHT: SNOW GLOBE (Perishable Theatre)

David Valdes Greenwood’s ingenious playlet is set inside a Gloucester-kitsch snow globe where Captain Al tries to steer a steady course as first-mate Mary Alice, urged toward escape by a Mephistophelean lobster, undergoes an existential crisis. “Is it the hand that made us that shakes us?” she queries as the characters are rocked on their pinions and pink styrofoam snow descends. Directed by Peter Wood, the clever piece was drolly performed by Sarah Savage, Jack Madden, and John Holdridge.

— CC

DIVESTITURE (American Repertory Theatre)

Robert Brustein is in a Beckett humor in this brief encounter with the Reaper, in the person of Remo Airaldi an “old clothes man” who turns up in a frail senior citizen’s apartment monotonally intent on stripping him of duds and dignity. Directed by David Wheeler, the piece is more mundane than enigmatic, but it was given a sort of poignancy by Alvin Epstein as Solomon, who can’t seem to donate enough to satisfy the rag man.

— CC

DOST PITY ME, WITHPETT? (Beau Jest Moving Theatre)

Hard to say what drug playwright Larry Blamire was on when he made this one up, a flourishy mock-Shakespearean dialogue that evolves out of an encounter between two actors, one rather arrogant about the Bard, who are trying to buy olives in a supermarket. But under Davis Robinson’s direction, Larry Coen, Lisa Tucker, and Robert Deveau approached both linguistic bravado and shopping impairment with Old Vic gusto.

— CC

50 YEARS OF CADDYING (American Stage Festival/ Gloucester Stage Company)

Israel Horovitz’s two-hander opens shortly after World War II, with a stereotypically WASPish golfer (Patrick Shea) relying on his African-American caddy (James Miles) to pick the right clubs during a country-club tournament. “You’re the closest thing I’ve ever had to a negro friend,” he says, but don’t expect any Driving Miss Daisy tenderness in this relationship. The first half of 50 Years is mostly a testament to white cluelessness, but Horovitz then turns the tables, with amusing results. Robert Walsh directed.

— RDS

JOSEPHINA (Hartford Stage Company)

Theresa Rebeck’s play, rendered with quiet intensity by Maria Gabriele under Nina Steiger’s direction, is a bit belabored. But its Old World insistence on the importance of bearing witness, and its condemnation of quick-information-processing modernity, is well taken. And its self-professed diarist, a World War II survivor with a chilling secret, takes a shot at our far-removed self-righteousness as well.

— CC

JUST DRIVING (Brandeis Theatre)

Written and directed by Lois Roach, this drama puts two black men in a car that is stopped by the police for no good reason. Naheem Allah and Dorian Baucum express a range of emotions, from cool to confusion to rage, as they’re threatened with guns, then sent on their way when the cops find that they’re innocent. Both the writing and the direction maintain a tight grip on the time frame, and that allowed the actors to escalate their responses.

— IF

MAY DAY (QE2 Players)

Tug Yourgraw’s macabre little play proves the importance, in the 10-minute format, of grabbing the audience immediately. Here a funeral director walks on, peers into a coffin, and recoils in horror: “Oh my God!” What ensues, as a quickie embalming takes place under stressful circumstances, is pretty funny if over-the-top. Under Marie Jackson’s direction, an apoplectic Ed Peed, abetted by Charlotte Peed, Ciaran Crawford, and Stephen Cooper, did everything he could to advance the cause of cremation.

— CC

ORDINARY GUY (New Repertory Theatre)

John Kuntz’s vignette, from Freaks, isn’t new. But under Adam Zahler’s direction, Phillip Patrone brought poignance as well as a relaxed, ingratiating presence to a piece previously performed by the more manic Kuntz, the story of a nice, bland guy who discovers at midlife that he’s comfortable only when sitting on powdered sugar.

— CC

ROGER G. (TheatreZone)

Directed by Marianna Bassham and Danielle Fauteaux Jacques, Bruce Ward’s offering reverses Kafka’s Metamorphosis: a bug named Roger G. wakes up one terrifying morning to find himself — gasp — human. It’s a gag worthy of vaudeville, and it was enhanced here by David Hanbury’s fine performance as the transmogrified insect and the directors’ dead-run pacing.

— IF

SITTING SHIVAH (Underground Railway Theater)

Alan Brody’s play, directed by Greg Smucker, is about two senior citizens who declaring their love for one another even though the body of one’s husband is barely in the ground. Seated on the “Shivah boxes,” the stark setting for the Orthodox Jewish period of mourning, veteran actors Ted Kazanoff and Annette Miller endowed the characters with such sweetness and compatibility that I hoped they wouldn’t waste a minute after the lights came down.

— IF

SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY (Shakespeare & Company)

Michael Hammond directed his own play about a businessman inexplicably brought to a frothing rage by an actor/therapist’s attempt to bring him into contact with his inner creativity. The piece was so masterfully performed by an exploding Dan McCleary, with an able assist from Tom Jaeger, that it was hard to resist, despite an over-obvious point about the incompatibility of art and commerce.

— CC

SOME KIND OF CERTAINTY (Wheelock Family Theatre)

A surgeon who performs organ transplants (John Davin) refers to himself as a “guru, hero, butcher, and savior.” Addressing the audience directly, he also reveals that he occasionally slips a beer into the plastic cooler carrying a heart or a kidney, so that he can calm his nerves before holding someone’s life in his hands. This all-too-human character brings an edge to Jonathan Vogels’s Some Kind of Certainty, which deals with a potentially mawkish story about how one premature death might prevent another young person from going before his time. The unwitting kidney donor is a woman who died in a car accident at a “dangerous intersection,” as her twin sister (Kit Wallach) tells us. “Now I am a presence and a void at the same time,” the surviving sister laments. We also look in on the couple whose son is on the waiting list; the wife (Jane Staab) is a painter who won’t include human figures in her landscapes because she prefers “more permanent images.” Directed by Vera Wayne, Certainty covers familiar ground, but Vogels creates some memorable character sketches.

— RDS

A TEN-MINUTE PLAY (New African Theatre)

“If I didn’t know no better, I’d forget this is a ghetto,” complains a Harlem resident named Shady (Lonnie Farmer), referring to the whites who are trying to gentrify his neighborhood and the Asian tourists who line up to get into gospel services. Sitting in front of a portrait of Clarence Thomas, Shady and fellow philosophizer Crafty (Vincent Siders) talk about their “big black Babylon.” Playwright Ed Bullins soon throws another character into the mix, a young African-American woman (Shauna Miles) who wants to mine the neighborhood for “research material.” When cash is involved, will Shady and Crafty give a tour of a crack house as if it were the Disney Store in Times Square? As directed by James Spruill, A Ten-Minute Play is tart and to the point.

— RDS

THREE-PEAT (New Century Theatre)

Writer/director Jack Neary brings back his front-porch trio from the ladies’ rocker brigade with a running commentary on current morality. Their conversation, couched in pure Dorchester Avenue patois, is about a mysterious “ménage à trois”: Billy, the women’s late neighbor’s son; his girlfriend; and another woman who’s keeping house with them. Mary Klug was wide-eyed in disbelief as Alma, her incredulity matched by the know-it-all attitudes of Kate Carney and Alice Duffy as Gert and Marjorie. Long may they wave!

— IF

THE VESTIGIAL TWIN (Theater Offensive)

Half of the Mrs. Potatohead team, Margaret Ann Brady, is the author of this wild-haired snippet about a disabled comic whose “vestigial twin” suddenly pops out, like a growth with personality, after years of just being an extra set of hammock-like legs. Some of the humor here is sophomoric, but the spectacle of Monica Tecca and Ana Luisa Perea, under David Hanbury’s direction, coming to grips with their new status as a sort of human teeter-totter was a loopy, if guilty, pleasure.

— CC

Issue Date: April 12-19, 2001