You know those joke-filled chain e-mails everyone gets? Maybe the one that uses bits of Jesus' biography to explain why the son of God was Mexican or Jewish or Irish, or the one that tries to make you laugh as it explores how older women's body parts start to resemble Jell-O.

Maybe you dig them and send them on. Maybe you hate them and instantly delete them. But here's betting you've never seen more than a dozen of them brought to life onstage.

The Women's Theatre Project and artistic director Genie Croft take care of that artistic omission with Naked Women Fully Clothed, a collection of 21 short ``plays'' loosely linked by the theme of women baring their truths. Yes, the word ``plays'' does belong in quotation marks, because though some of the pieces are actual short plays with credited authors, others are plucked from the Internet and performed with varying degrees of success -- or failure.

Truth be told, Naked Women Fully Clothed does provide some laughs, thanks to its hardworking ensemble: Lela Elam, Sally Bondi, Jacqueline Laggy, Jude Parry, Carol Sussman and Alisha Todd. But it also demonstrates how tough it is to find a qualitatively matched collection of short plays, and that it takes more than performers to turn a joke into real theater.

Except for costume pieces, Naked Women has bare-bones production values, relying instead on the actors' ability to transport us to such varied locations as a classroom, a restaurant, a ladies' room and the Garden of Eden. Subjects range from a lesbian's automotive orientation (she drives a Subaru) to aging 21st century Barbies battling facial hair, bunions and flabby upper arms.

Some pieces -- Tammy Ryan's Little Red Riding Hood's Mother, or I Am Pastrami and Yvette (both by ``Anonymous''), for example -- go nowhere. Others perfectly suit their performers, as when Elam becomes a born-again chef in Jill Morley's The Baptist Gourmet and Bondi uses her skills as a commercial pitchwoman in the deliciously black comic Dear Tide (an e-mail that does work as theater).

Any woman who has ever used a public restroom -- and haven't we all? -- is going to cringe and hoot as the entire cast performs Isn't This the Truth, in which the gals detail all the perils that await inside a stall (no seat covers, no toilet paper, no door lock, no hook to hold your purse, automatic flushing systems that unexpectedly anoint a woman balanced precariously over the seat).

But that exploration of bathroom indignities, resonant though it may be, and those few sparkling performances are hardly enough reason to sit through more than two hours of 21 short plays about boobs, Barbies and frustrated waitress-actresses.

Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.

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