Though it happens only once a year, for a month at the start of each summer, City Theatre's Summer Shorts Festival is on any true South Florida arts aficionado's short list of must-see theater.

Entertaining, sometimes enlightening and generally just plain fun, this year's festival serves up 16 short comedies and dramas in two programs dubbed Signature Shorts. Next week, the five plays in City Theatre's Shorts 4 Kids festival and eight edgy works in the late-night Undershorts program join the mix in the Carnival Studio Theater at Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, taking the company's penchant for multitasking to a challenging new extreme.

The news coming out of Signature Shorts, a few nitpicks aside, is overwhelmingly positive. Under new artistic director Stuart Meltzer, the 13-year-old festival is consistently good, and some of the pieces are riotously funny, deeply disturbing or undeniably touching. In a typical Shorts festival, a few plays leave you wondering what those who picked something that weird/flawed could have been thinking. Nothing in Signature Shorts bottoms out so completely, a tribute to the play choices, the company and the work of Meltzer and fellow directors Michael Montel, Margaret Ledford, Rafael de Acha, Amy London, Stephanie Norman, Kim St. Leon and Clive Cholerton.

Meltzer has said that he chose this summer's nine actors even before settling on the plays. Smart move.

Though notably short on diversity, the company features some of the region's best performers, including Carbonell Award winners Laura Turnbull, Antonio Amadeo, Terry Hardcastle, Paul Tei and Kim Ostrenko. Stephen Trovillion, who has been part of Summer Shorts nearly every year since it began, again demonstrates why watching his richly detailed work is, for his many fans, the reason they go to the festival. Elena Garcia, one of the best improv performers around, is to-die-for funny. And Lindsey Forgey (a recent New World School of the Arts college grad) and Nick Duckhardt (still at New World) bring their fresh talent into the mix.

Perhaps Meltzer's best decision, in addition to bringing Trovillion back from his teaching gig in Wisconsin, was hiring Turnbull. Her range in Program A (the stronger of the two eight-play presentations) is dazzling.

In Henry Meyerson's Silence, a deeply moving piece about elderly Holocaust survivors trying to make sense of the too-early death of their beloved only son, Turnbull and Trovillion are both fierce and heartbreaking; later, as quite a different couple in Martin Russell's Eros Is Sore Spelled Backwards, they're saucy, playful and a tad insecure. In Edwin Sanchez's monologue Jody's Mother, Turnbull expertly navigates a shamed mother's heartbreak, love and despair. And in Michael McKeever's inspired-by-fact Laura Keene Goes On, Turnbull brings both a period feeling and a comedically burnished ego the size of her huge hoop skirt to the role of the actress-manager miffed that her celebratory 1,000th performance in Our American Cousin has been halted by the shooting of Abraham Lincoln.

In addition to his anguished performance in Silence, Trovillion does brilliant work opposite Duckhardt in John Yearley's My Father's Heart, about a businessman whose deeply dysfunctional teen son has made him loathe both the boy and himself. Classic Trovillion -- sly, arch, full of perfectly pitched attitude -- is on display in Paul Rudnick's Sheepish, a magazine piece (about an openly gay sheep) that Trovillion (with an assist from costume designer Ellis Tillman) helps turn into a comic gem.

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