‘Mere Mortals’ Mildly Pleasing

“Mere Mortals” Friday night, Firth Chew Studio Theatre

David Ives packs more imagination into one tiny playlet than most playwrights pack into their entire careers.

Who else could write an entire playlet about a guy trying to seduce women on a miniature golf course and then turn the whole thing into a time-shifting treatise on the ephemeral nature of a good pickup line?

“Mere Mortals” picks up where his earlier collection, “All in the Timing” left off. These six one-acts are little gems of comedy, and the best of them build to something that borders on the profound, assuming that the word “profound” can be used for a play about two mayflies making out on a couch.

In this Firth Chew Studio Theatre production, “Mere Mortals” never quite hits the comic peaks of “All in the Timing.” The production itself is a bit flatter and Ives’ material isn’t quite as strong. Instead of hysterical, I would call it amusing. But I mean amusing in a positive way, as in entertaining, pleasing and even, yes, intellectually stimulating.

In the best piece, “Time Flies,” Ives showed us how he can make us laugh (and think) on several different levels. On the most superficial level, he can reel off numerous puns on the theme of insects, since this is about two mayflies who fall in love. As Ives says, it is “larvae at first sight.”

For instance, May (played wonderfully by Mary Stiller) puts on some music by Gnat King Cole.

But then Ives goes off on a riff about the mayfly’s arch-enemies, the frogs.

“I like frog films,” says mayfly Horace (Nick Curtis Jackson). “I like frog literature. It’s just the frogs themselves I don’t like.”

Finally, the play takes a deeper turn when TV host David Attenborough (played by Maynard Villers) announces that the mayfly’s lifespan is one day. This seemingly goofy play now becomes a condensed comic meditation on the biological imperative (eat, breed, die) and on the fact that human existence, boiled down to its essence, is not so far different from the mayfly’s.

This play closes the first half, and the three plays that follow - a spoof of David Mamet, a vaudevillean bit of fluff about a doctor, and a Kafka-esque story of a man who wakes up and decides he’s the artist Degas - are not up to Ives’ usual standards. This show has what you might call a second-act letdown.

The ensemble cast - Villers, Jackson, Stiller, Jone Campbell Bryan, Jennifer M. Gunderson and Stuart McKenzie - do a uniformly good job in multiple roles. However, director John G. Phillips’ production feels somehow less fully realized than the hit “All in the Timing” production of two years ago. The sets and costumes are mostly nonexistent, and some of the playlets need a bit more spark.

But it still makes for a wild, often bawdy, ride through Ives’ imagination.

“Mere Mortals” continues through Nov. 20. Call 325-2507 for tickets.