Dark Tone and all, Summer Shorts a Bright Spot of Summer

Now in its 12th season, City Theatre's Summer Shorts Festival moves into a new home at Miami's Carnival Center in a celebratory mood. So why are so many of its 15 playlets about death and bloodletting?

That is not a criticism, but an observation that the human stakes are high in more than half of this year's crop of world and Southeastern premieres, each running 10-15 minutes in length. Even in a comedy like Craig Wright's Foul Territory, about a hapless fan who cannot seem to avoid being hit by baseballs fouled off into the stands, the major budget line item is for fake blood.

Perhaps the most affecting, fully realized work is Ambivalent by Joshua James, about a businessman in an airport waiting area who announces to the rest of the imminent passengers that he has had a clear premonition that their Los Angeles-bound plane is going to crash. After frightening off many in the group, Summer Shorts veteran Steve Trovillion explains why he intends to take the flight anyway.

And ending Program B of this year's Shorts is Davie playwright Michael McKeever's Splat!, a comic look at the moral dilemma facing The Wizard of Oz's Munchkins after they have declared the witch that Dorothy's house landed on to be dead, but then learn otherwise. Aided by Erin Amico's whimsical MGM-inspired costumes, the play aptly caps the various intimations of mortality.

City Theatre's well-produced menu of short plays fits well in the "black box" Studio Theater of Miami's new performing arts center, configured in-the-round, with audience on all four sides of the stage. As has become the company's signature style, set pieces get whisked on and off quickly by an energetic crew of interns and while the two programs -- available on separate evenings or in weekend marathons -- have only a few subpar plays, at least they do not last long.

By now it is established that Summer Shorts attracts some of the region's  most accomplished actors, drawn by the challenge of creating vivid characters quickly.

In addition to Trovillion, who is also convincing as the perplexed head Munchkin and a put-upon clothes designer harried by his demanding client, standouts include Irene Adjan and Tom Wahl. The diminutive Adjan looms as a restless wife who is drawn to grizzly bears and a grandmotherly ancestor who was part of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Wahl, in addition to that battered baseball fan, scores a hit as a grown man so obsessed with the world of Disney that he has his back tattooed in Jim Fitzmorris' ominous The Sons of Mickey.

Making their Summer Shorts debuts are Ceci Fernandez, impressive as a rebellious, homeless daughter in Kent Brown's Playtime and Bechir Sylvain as an urban youth trying to escape his life into superhero fantasy in festival literary manager Marco Ramirez's I am not Batman.

The two separate programs are relatively equal in quality, though Program A skews more toward comedy and Program B to drama. A is a bit more consistent, where B has both the best pieces and a couple -- Monserrat Mendez's silly Telemundo soap-opera parody ?Donde Esta Pedro Mano? and Sarah Hammond's unpersuasive Flour Cloud about a bakery disaster -- that bring down the curve.

Still, Summer Shorts Festival 2007 hits far more often than it misses, is well-performed and staged, and looks attractive at the Carnival Center. It plays there through July 8, before moving to the Broward Center for a weekend, July 12-15.