Cafe Theater's artistic director David Hoffman is apparently a graduate of the Burns and Schreiber School of Play Selection.

There are seven plays in the latest collection, called Summer Shorts.  They are all funny and tightly performed.  And many of them, as produced in the upstairs room at Tierney's, owe at least a little debt of gratitude to the manic patter Jack Burns and the late Avery Schreiber perfected in their mad cab driver routines of the 1960s and '70s.

This is especially true of Greg Scott Mihalik's The Doubts, in which John P. Dowgin and Brian Parks play a couple of laborers racing through an increasingly improbable series of stories.

A Monty Python routine, The Argument Clinic, gets the same treatment.  So does Bill Mesce's Passing the Deal, a nice ensemble piece set around a poker table.

Though the plays are comedies, the one with the fewest laughs is the one that stays with you the longest.  Monica, Before and After (Dan Ho), ends up being a lament by a former fat girl who's lost something irretrievable of herself -- along with a couple of hundred pounds.  Sharon Garry is affecting in the title role.

Passing the Deal and Mamet's Women, the last two plays, make a good pairing.  The men around the poker table increasingly discover their softer sides (they take a little too long to do it for my taste, but still).  And in Frederick Stoppel's satire, Ms. Garry and Diane Gilch talk like men -- at least, like David Mamet men -- tossing vulgarities around like whiffle balls on the difficult subject of getting a babysitter for a Tupperware party.  The actresses have a great time with it.  And so do we.

Cafe Theater's Summer Shorts is on tonight and tomorrow at Tierney's on Valley Road.  If you go, sit in the middle of the room for the best view.  The plays are performed along the bar and on the opposite wall, and there's little movement.  

-- Warren Levinson