Last modified: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 12:46 PM EST REVIEW: One-acts do the trick at MMAS theater BY JAMES A. MEROLLA / STAFF THEATER WRITER MANSFIELD - As someone much wittier than I once said, "Brevity is the soul of wit." Thus it is with the quartet of one-act plays being staged by the New England Repertory Company and the Mansfield Music & Arts Society and for the next two weekends at the MMAS Black Box Theatre. For your entertainment pleasure are four memorably short entities, yet each with its own weight and bearing, each a jewel for entirely different reasons. Two are suspenseful, one of these gritty. The other two are light, witty, exuberant paeans to new love. The meat of the evening are the fuller dramas: "Hello Out There" by William Saroyan and "Sorry, Wrong Number" by Lucille Fletcher. The Saroyan piece, an early work by one of America's great storytellers, was first produced way back in 1942. It still holds up, 66 years later. We are thrust into a small jail cell in a God-forsaken Texas town in the 1930s, where we meet a young drifter, a down-on-his-luck gambler, played with scintillating brilliance by newcomer Lucas Lloyd. Lloyd - a Tennessee native now living in Boston and making his first appearance with NERC at MMAS - is the find of the year. His seamless, flowing take on the "lonesome" prisoner, wrongly accused of rape is a tour de force and the highlight of the entire evening. With oversized boots and an overactive libido, while trying to ingratiate himself to his only hope in the cold, dark Texas night - a homely teenage girl who cleans up the jail for 50 cents a day (played with appropriate woundedness by Jean Swaebe), Lloyd is riveting. Whether punctuating the air by hard shadowboxing in between desperate discourses, or seducing the fragile girl to get him out, or confessing to just "trying to find somebody good," Lloyd steals the night. Completely devoid of self-consciousness, you forget you are watching a performance. Directed cleanly and with raw power by Mike Kiernan, "Hello Out There" sucks you into its inevitable tragic denouement with the whipping force of a Matador Twister. Its central question - "Does the drifter really like the girl or is he only using her to survive?" - is never fully resolved, hanging in the dank air like an unwashed stone. "Sorry, Wrong Number" began as a radio play starring Agnes Moorhead, and that's the version used by director Beth Goldman here. It stars Alice Springer as Mrs. Stevenson, an older invalid woman who inadvertently ties into a phone conversation between two men who are setting up the vicious murder of some unidentified woman. As she frantically tries to reach her absent husband, or a center to deliver a home nurse, or convince the police or a row of operators of the dire seriousness of what she's heard with no success, tension mounts, clues are revealed, and Anderson finds herself victim in more ways than one. As the center of this piece, Springer does a fair job of acting, even injecting some humor into the dark tale, but she comes off as more annoying than acutely distressed. The climactic last minutes should have been more powerful. These two chillers are set off by two delightful shorts. The first is "The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year," by John Guare, a surreal look at a very unusual romance in the park. Brian Kelly - a solid actor in many NERC and MMAS productions - plays a strange, riotously funny man with an aversion to pigeons, polar bears and ducks (revealing an outrageous story for each). He somehow meets a shy woman (a very good Dawn Tucker) on a park bench and continues to meet her on successive Sundays. That is, until his brute of a wife with a blue rifle and a silencer spots them and, well, you'll just have to see. It's a marvelous, zany piece that is well delivered. The other short is called "The Red Coat," by John Patrick Shanley, a coming of age declaration of young love between a boy and a girl. Played without a hint of guile, in that pure, unadulterated way that only first-love can merit and declare, this 15-minute trifle touches the heart and the soul. With very loud, slightly tipsy enthusiasm, John (Ted Harris, a very good high school sophomore), declares his love for Mary outside a teen party. This is done in such an unabashed, delirious way, you immediately yearn to be 14 again; to have that second chance at first love. Harris is matched by Sarah Shear (a high school freshman), who shows quickly why she is so lovable. The NERC one-acts have become a staple in the winter months around Mansfield, and I strongly urge you to go to see why. "Sorry, Wrong Number" and "Hello Out There" run through March 2 at the MMAS Black Box Theater, 30 Crocker St., Mansfield. $20 for general admission/ $19 for MMAS members, $18 students. Call 508-339-2822 or go to www.mmas.org.