What are short plays supposed to be, really? Are they five-minute SNL-style sketches, one-punchline jokes with actors? Are they truly just plays of lessened length? Or are they something else entirely? Even Michael Steves himself, the writer and director of Dirty Kinky Short Plays—which are not that dirty, not that kinky, and in some cases not even that short—doesn’t seem to be completely sure. The six plays that make up Dirty Kinky are consistently funny, and they’re spattered with sporadic moments of brilliance that prove Steves’ talent as a writer. But they’re hampered throughout by an unsureness about the world they want to present that makes you long for the show Dirty Kinky could be.

The opening play—Lemur Love, a jungle bro-fest between a nebbish lemur and a laid-back sloth—is the weakest of the bunch, toeing the line between theater and sketch comedy more than any of the other plays. It’s essentially one joke, extended for six or seven minutes: anthropomorphized animals have problems with women, too! While it felt more like a first draft than a finished piece, it still managed hilarity at times, in part thanks to the chemistry between lemur Richie Starzec and sloth Sam Sontag. A joke about grabbing onto the woman you love and never letting go—cliché advice according to the lemur, but meant literally by the sloth—is a standout, as is an obvious but still laugh-out-loud funny gag that has the sloth run from hunters in excruciatingly slow motion.

The next play, A Romantic Night (of the Living Dead) gets off to a strong start with a clever false-protagonist fake-out: it opens on a muscled action hero, only to have him almost immediately killed and eaten by the zombies who are the real stars. Zombies on a first date: it’s more or less the same kind of one-joke wonder as Lemur Love, but the premise is smarter and the piece holds up better. A Lady and the Tramp reference, with human guts instead of spaghetti, is a particularly fun moment.

Kirby Sokolow and Matthew Younger feast on the bloody innards of Bryce Hollingsworth in "A Romantic Night (of the Living Dead)"

Memoirs of a Virgin, the third play, is the first to reach for something more than just laughs. It features Chad, a comically-bearded dude whose wild loss of virginity story is interrupted by the living memory of his high school girlfriend, burst from within his mind to tell her version of the story. It’s a great concept, and the execution strikes a nice balance between humor and sweetness, but it loses its energy midway through with an unnecessary digression about how Chad’s bro friends can see and hear the girl in his memory. Steves introduces this conceit well enough that the audience has already bought it, and the further non-explanation is just distracting. But the piece goes out on a high note as one of the bros nervously comes out of the closet only to be completely ignored by his friends as the lights go down.

Dirty Kinky picks up with Family Values, a piece about a family of suburban contract killers who invite a victim, bound and gagged, to dine with them before his death. Values is helped by a number of great sight gags focusing on Michelle Agresti, as the Stepford-Wife mother, dumping spoons of macaroni into the unwilling mouth of duct-taped Matt Krakaur, and there’s a hilarious line in which father Joseph Gargan acknowledges the “surprising awesomeness” of his daughter’s gun.

Suburban mother Michelle Agresti spoon-feeds about-to-be-killed Matt Krakaur in "Family Values"

But it’s with the last two plays, Romeo v. Juliet and Levi Goldberg’s Totally Rad Bar Mitzvah, that Dirty Kinky really hits its stride. Romeo presents us with a middle-aged Romeo and Juliet, trapped in an increasingly unhappy marriage. The performances—Peter Cramer as Romeo and Danielle Springer as Juliet—are both fantastic, as is the modernized Olde English blend that is Steves’ faux-Shakespearean dialogue. Unfortunately, the world of the play is undercut by repeated cheap jokes about how the two protagonists have never read the play from which they originate, but the piece is saved by its unexpected, well-played ending.

Levi Goldberg is even better. A sprawling, multi-character epic, it presents us with a tableau of personalities all converged at, yes, thirteen-year-old Levi Goldberg’s bar mitzvah. Instead of following a straight narrative, the show fades Altman-esque between different groups. It’s an engrossing capstone to the rest of the show, helped by Solomon Billinkoff’s strong performance as Levi’s angry, divorced father and Matt Leibowitz’s pitch-perfect take on an obnoxious bar mitzvah DJ. The piece is weighed down by a clumsy attempt to tie the whole show together that has characters from the previous plays—Romeo, Juliet, and the contract-killer family, among others—all wind up at the bar mitzvah; it’s distracting, and those characters’ absurdism feels out of place in the realistically written and acted bar mitzvah scene. Still, though, Levi Goldberg ends the show on a poignant note, and it doesn’t lack for laughs. More than any of the others, it showcases Steves’ talent as a playwright.

by Max Nussenbaum