Ensemble Studio Theater's Marathon 2003.

There's been an apocalyptic air to some of the plays in Marathon 2003, the Ensemble Studio Theater's 26th annual festival of one-acts. This is understandable. The deadline for play submissions for the much-loved event is always the previous November. Two months wasn't enough time for anyone to process the events of September 2001, and the plays in the following year's Marathon reflected this. This year, there's been a 9/11 awareness?particularly in Series A, which ran from May 11 to May 29.

The evening began with Susan Kim's Memento Mori (directed by Abigail Zealy Bess), about a couple of women waiting in a deserted restaurant, between two unspecified blasts, apparently for the world to end; and finished up with Romulus Linney's Coda, a fugue for four voices set in the wake of some sort of holocaust or catastrophe, directed by Julie Boyd. I was glad both plays were there?it seemed fitting?but I liked the Linney play considerably more than the first, whose luncheon companions, an aging show-biz harridan (Laura Kenyon at the performance I attended) and her younger and more uptight companion (Amy Staats), clarified their relationship while trying to figure out why they couldn't get any service in the emptied-out city. (It was less obvious than it sounds on paper, but not by much.)

In Linney's play, four people, recently deceased, mysteriously singled out from a large crowd of other souls, tried to remember who they had been in life. They were unattractive people, although we didn't know this at the start. One by one, each sought to interpret isolated images and memories through a moral and mental haze, trying to piece together who and what they had primarily been. They spoke in turns, cyclically, no one listening or responding very much to anyone else (it was this, along with the wonderfully varied timbre of the actors' voices, that gave the piece the quality of a fugue), occasionally evincing interest in the question of why they'd been separated from a much larger group of souls some way off. At first we thought it had something to do with their interest in self-examination. In fact, the more they remembered, the more sinister the truth appeared: The woman who thought the white coat she remembered wearing indicated that she had been a pediatric doctor or nurse turned out to have been a sadistic laboratory scientist. The fellow who thought he recalled a life of gregarious bonhomie turned out to have been a hopeless drunk, caring for nothing and no one. And so on.

I liked the way their anxiety about their human and moral worth diminished proportionately with their amnesia?as though the act of remembering was itself more important than the actual facts. I also liked their lack of concern about the bright light moving rapidly toward them. I wish it had engulfed them before the script ultimately turned obvious and heavy-handed.

The one-act-play festival at EST is my favorite event of the theater season. I always look forward to it, and I'm never disappointed. This isn't to say that I always think well of all of the plays in the lineup. It's always a mixed bag, but over the years, I've come to expect certain constants. There's often a wacky-surreal divertissement that everyone but me seems to love. (This year it was Series B's Water Music by Tina Howe, directed by Pam MacKinnon, which proposed an encounter between a lifeguard, an English teacher in the New York City public school system and Shakespeare's Ophelia in the whirlpool of the Galaxy Health Club.) There's usually one play that is probably best spoken of as "brave," a term that can encompass anything from "benighted" to "bewildering." There's sometimes a performance or two that would have been swell if it had been taken down a few notches. And there's always at least one real gem in each series.

Part of the experience of the festival is learning to take the wonderful with the not-so-wonderful. The novice playwright whose piece, one year, you find irritating may be the source of a piece that knocks the sawdust out of you two or three festivals down the line. Even a minor work from a playwright you've come to admire can be strangely inspiring.

It's partly to do with the nature of the one-act play: It's a modest form, conducive to modesty?not modest writing and acting, but writing and acting that exhibit modesty. Under the guidance of Curt Dempster, the company's founder and artistic director, the festival has always been an occasion to see the virtues and limitations of theater?what it can and can't do?revealed in the best possible light. Nothing is on display but the work itself, occasionally bolstered by inventive staging or design. It's also a chance to see favorite actors (like Bill Cwikowski, Scotty Bloch and James Rebhorn), discover new ones (like Geneva Carr and Conor White), to see what well-known or established playwrights like John Guare and Tina Howe have been thinking about, and to check in with others, like Leslie Ayvazian and Billy Aronson, who perhaps ought to be better known. I know someone who goes to the Marathon every year for the sole purpose of seeing what Ayvazian is up to.

The idea of crossover is a big part of the EST esthetic?actors who write and writers who act. Ayvazian always performs her own work, so that even a sketch about a woman trying to resist the blandishments of a hotel vending machine (Series B's Hi There, Mr. Machine, directed by Leigh Silverman) comes off with a certain panache. This year, Amy Staats, who appeared in one of the plays in Series A, doubled as playwright and performer. (Her Changing of the Guard, directed by Mark Roberts, about the tribulations of two teenage girls vacationing with their grandmother in London, is the second play in Series B.)

In my view, the one immutable fact of the EST Marathon is the way the Times reviewer always gets it wrong, dismissing whatever the audience favorites found most memorable and moving. This year, for instance, the two audience in Series A seemed to be Billy Aronson's Of Two Minds, a Schnitzlerian roundelay about unwitting triangles among the members of two fractured families, directed by Jamie Richards, and Garry Williams' A Blooming of Ivy (directed by Richmond Hoxie, about a recent widower (James Rebhorn) who comes courting the longtime widow (Phyllis Somerville) on a neighboring farm, which the Times dismissed as "attenuated and sentimental." The play had half the people around me blubbing and was the one I remembered for days afterward. It was partly the exquisitely understated acting and direction, and partly just the quality of the writing, which was lyrical and idiosyncratic without being cutesy or literary. The point was that it sidestepped sentimentality, though you couldn't have said why.

As a rule, it doesn't do to get too literary in the one-act play. Elegant structures and devices have a tendency to overshadow the detail and nuance that are the form's chief beauties. Deborah Grimberg's The Honey Makers, directed by Tom Rowan, in Series A, was a case in point. The play was about a pair of North London shopkeepers, an East Indian couple, trying to rid their backyard of a bee colony. Meanwhile, their shop is under attack by a crowd of brutish skinheads. It's easy to see what's going on in a play like this: The bigoted skinheads are laying siege to the shopkeepers who, in turn, are laying siege to the bees?that is, Lalita, the wife (Cori Thomas), fearing for the safety of her grandchildren, wants to get rid of the bees, send them back where they came from. Arjun, the husband (Thom Rivera), takes a more liberal view. He's curious about the bees and identifies with them. He asks empathic and incisive questions of the beekeeper (Bill Cwikowski) who comes to collect the bees at no charge because, as a victim of the economy, he's had to fall back on manufacturing honey. Arjun is a veritable Virgil, full of potential unwritten georgics. But Lalita prevails?both about the bees and about not holding out a helping hand to the beekeeper, who's asked them to buy his honey.

Ironically, the play echoes the very tendencies it seeks to decry. The whining, nagging, self-centered shopkeeper-wife is a stereotype as simplistic and false as anything that the play's bullying skinhead (Jake Myers) could come up with. A less schematic structure would have allowed for more nuance, but then the playwright would have had to rethink all those metaphors and analogies.

Lynn Rosen's Washed Up on the Potomac, in Series B, is a good example of a play that manages to be literary without trying. Set in the proofreading department of a Washington advertising agency, it doesn't set out to make any big point about the life of the quasi-literary freelancer, though it beautifully captures a universal type?the idiosyncratic underachiever. Under Eileen Myers' direction (and casting), every character in the play is pitch-perfect: the married guy with ambiguous facial hair who writes and performs comedy (Sean Sutherland), the frail would-be novelist in scarf and downtown glasses (Anne Torsiglieri), the pretty, shiny-faced graduate saving for law school, the androgynous drone of a supervisor (Joan Rosenfels), who in the play's peripatetic twist, pushes them all to the brink of definitive choice. The joke is that while they all fear and expect downsizing, the actual fate that confronts them?becoming full-time?is much, much worse.

I don't think for a moment that Ms. Rosen wrote the play with the idea of synecdoche in mind, but one of the pleasures of the piece is the way that literary device seems to haunt these people. Everything in their lives is represented by "the part for the whole," whether it's the isolated words and lines they compare between documents, the Post-its that the novelist finds on the corkboard, covered with story ideas she can no longer understand, the snatches of Shakespeare that they all know and recite in unison, the intermittent belches of ranting from the copywriter in the next cubicle coming to them over the wall, or the bits and pieces of one another's lives that they know and remember.

What comes across is the degree to which these people thrive on partial experience. What terrifies them is the prospect of having to put it all together.

Last in the lineup of plays for Series B, which runs through June 21, is John Guare's enigmatic and rewarding Woman at a Threshold, Beckoning, directed by Will Pomerantz. An anecdotal piece that presents itself as autobiographical, it recounts a post-9/11 stint of grand-jury service in which a seemingly endless series of routine buy-and-busts was interrupted by an terrorist-espionage-deportation case. Last year, I saw an earlier version of the Guare at "Brave New World," an evening of theater held at Town Hall on the first anniversary. There was a self-conscious quality to the play. It was as though the playwright were watching himself write, deeply conscious of how others would judge his reponse to the events of September 11. This tentative quality overshadowed much that was interesting, moving or thought-provoking in the piece.

That aspect of the piece is gone, now, I'm happy to say. This is due in no small part to Mr. Pomerantz's direction, which shifts a good deal of the play's rhetorical burden from the actor playing the narrator-protagonist to the staging. Also, the play seems to have been substantially rewritten. Either Mr. Guare himself conquered his own anxieties or else the unerring instincts of Mr. Dempster and his associates urged him towards a more honest and forthright exegesis.