Posted on Sat, Jun. 14, 2008

City Theatre's popular Summer Shorts Festival has always been complex, especially considering that it is built around the pleasures of little comedies and brief dramas. Lots of plays, many actors and interns, a number of directors and designers: The challenges (and stresses) of putting together a program as successful and satisfying as City's current Signature Shorts lineup are major.

So what have executive director Stephanie Norman and artistic director Stuart Meltzer done in this, the 13th year for Summer Shorts? They've added a dozen more plays, six more actors, three more directors and two vastly different programs to the work they're presenting this month in the Carnival Studio Theater at Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.

''We wanted to make the festival more festive,'' says Norman, facing a 10 a.m.-to-midnight day at the Arsht Thursday, beginning with Shorts 4 Kids! and ending with Undershorts. ``I can't imagine anything more cool than all the different people coming through here today.''

Shorts 4 Kids! happens in the mornings and early afternoons, with the cast performing five high-quality plays in about an hour. The eight plays of Undershorts, a late-night program that follows Signature Shorts, are City Theatre's attempt at making theater attractive to a young adult crowd with edgy, sexy, quirky pieces.

And the same actors who do the G-rated plays in the morning jump into the R- or X-rated stuff at night.

'At the beginning, it was almost confusing to us, which were the kids' plays and which were the adult,'' says Ceci Fernandez, the only member of the Kids/Undershorts company who has performed in the regular Summer Shorts Festival.

''We have a tendency to go to the raunchy,'' actor Sally Bondi adds with a grin.

In truth, as the programs' final dress rehearsal Wednesday made abundantly clear, the differences between Shorts 4 Kids! and Undershorts are major, as they should be.

The plays in Shorts 4 Kids! were commissioned by City Theatre. Literary manager Marco Ramirez, who wound up writing two of them, says that although the company looks at some 1,200 plays a year for Signature Shorts, few would fit into a program aimed at 6- to 12-year-olds.

City wanted engaging plays that wouldn't ''bore the parents either,'' says Ramirez, an award-winning playwright. That's what it got.

Lloyd Suh's X5000 is about a scientist with Albert Einstein hair, his girl robot and an inquisitive brainiac who happens to be sitting in the audience. Double Mandible by Julie Jensen is about sisters with vastly different levels of enthusiasm for the water ballet they do. Michael McKeever's Tina Thompson Tries the Tuba is a whimsical comedy (featuring the letter ''T'' -- a lot) about trying new things. Ramirez's The Big Brain on Bobby Martin is a rich, sweet piece about kids' feelings. His other play, Becky Meets Mordecai Baxter, begins more farcically but reveals surprising tenderness and depth.

Shorts 4 Kids!, which will travel to the Broward Center along with Signature Shorts at the end of June, is clearly an entertaining add-on to Signature Shorts. The made-to-shock Undershorts, which is a Miami-only experiment this year, isn't as well focused or qualitatively consistent.

In Savannah Reich's Times of Change: an educational film, a faux narrator of the kind of this-is-puberty movies shown in health class explains bodily changes, as a horny boy and randy girl demonstrate. Mom and daughter assassins are featured in Alex Dremann's On the Porch One Crisp Spring Morning. Justin Cooper's Wood, the most sexually bold piece, features a woman, a ventriloquist and the guy's specially modified dummy (think massive sex toy); that play, says actor Erin Joy Schmidt, has been a lesson in ``how to let go of a lot of things. I've done Williams, O'Neill and Shakespeare, and now I've also done a puppet.''

David Ives' Mobe Dude is a cute stoner's summary of Moby Dick. Ken Brisbois' Paul & Eddie, about two thieves hanging on crosses near Jesus, manages to be both unfunny and offensive. Bondi gets a wacky star turn in Craig Pospisil's Guns Don't Kill, about a teacher who intends to beat any violence-prone classroom intruders to the punch. Rolin Jones' The Mercury and the Magic features a pair of trouble-making possums (with Ellis Tillman's costumes just as funny as the play itself). Jones also authored the final Undershorts piece, Chronicles Simpkins Will Cut Your Ass, about a tetherball bully and her tough-girl posse, including Fernandez as the chongalicious Jessica.

The performers -- David Hemphill, Andy Quiroga, Kevin Reilley, Fernandez, Schmidt and Bondi -- actually do keep their first-rate work in Shorts 4 Kids! and Undershorts as different as day and night. Which is as it should be.