Anyone who looks at the paucity of plays on Broadway and wonders where the playwrights have gone need look no farther than "Close Shave" at Cafe Theatre, an evening of eight comic short plays currently on at the upstairs room at Tierney's.

You go in with relatively low expectations (Plays in a bar? How good could this be?), but you come away with a whole new appreciation of the power of words and gestures to entertain, and of the quality of the drama program at Montclair State, where many of the principals are students or recent graduates.

The plays are well-observed and well-directed. The casts are uniformly excellent, but some standouts are worth mentioning here.

Jon Barker is hilarious in two different roles: as a sciurophobic layabout called on to help a stranger (played by the funny and adorable Liz Gerecitano) transport a box full of squirrels in Ben Clawson's Quarrels; and in the title role of Marc Castle's Mr. Company, where he is a programmable robot companion being fought over by two women. Barker shows a facility for accents, and, despite spending the whole play seated on the bar, a knack for physical comedy.

Marly Bewighouse is funny as the lovesick customer in Mr. Company, funny and a little spooky as a Reader's Digest-spouting wife driven to extremes to stop her husband's smoking in Greg Scott Mihalik's For Better.

Brian Parks has a nice turn as a ballplayer reluctantly performing post-season service in Sid Frank's Suicide Squeeze.

Costuming and props are minimal. There are no sets. (Suicide Squeeze takes place mostly on a building ledge, represented by a long table.) But we don't miss them.

-- Warren Levinson