Three Comedies by Village Playhouse (By Way of Video)

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Photo via Village Playhouse

The Village Playhouse breathes comedy through three shorts be one of the 20th century’s most respected playwrights this month as it presents “An Evening with Shaw” online. Recorded on a cozy little stage before a live studio audience, the three comic shorts are by George Bernard Shaw.

“How He Lied to Her Husband” is the top short on the evening. Dawn Molly Dewane is engagingly nervous as a woman suffering from concerns over her extra-marital relations with a gentleman played with towering upper-class poise by deep-voiced Clayton Mortl. The heavy humor of the piece is lowered-into place with a degree of cleverness by a similarly poised Paul Weir as a husband who takes great offense at the situation in a rather unexpected way.

The middle short on the evening is “Overruled.” The challenges of polygamy are delicately treaded through by Derek Jacobs and Sarah Jo Martens as a couple of people discussing feelings complicated by the fact that they’re both married to other people. There’s a strong sense of connection between Jacobs and Martens that carries the short well enough to stand as the strongest on the program. Edward Grant and Amy Wickland deliver the comic convolutions that render a very complicated look at human relations.

The final short on the evening is the erratic comic melodrama “Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction.” The strange complexity of poison, antidote, life and death is a bit lost on a production that doesn’t quite manage the madcap dark comedy that Shaw wove into the script, but it rounds-out a satisfying evening of formal comedy in the gently informal format of three sitcom-length videos that can be watched in any order with ample time between each over the course of an extended evening.

The Village Playhouse’s “An Evening With Shaw” is available through April 25. For more information, visit villageplayhouse.org.