The Sacramento 2Page Play Festival

Think of this show as 77 minutes spent grazing on appetizers. Included are 24 sketches or playlets—21 of them described as “world premieres"—with none more than five minutes long. All but two are duets or two-character dialogues. They’re short and piquant, and every couple of minutes, the lights dim and then come back up, and a new playlet begins.The titles, including Snap, Crackle and Pop (in which a depressed woman talks with a bowl of Rice Krispies), Death Rides a Bicycle, God Meets the Speech Therapist and You’re Not What I Expected, hint at what’s in store. Almost all of the sketches are humorous to some degree. Many involve love, or at least flirtation or desire, along with love’s potential consequences, including pregnancy. Directors Evan Nossoff and Wendy Aspegren save the most touching sketch for the end: a vignette involving “the waving man,” a shabbily dressed street person who continuously smiles and waves at passing strangers in their cars.

It’s basically a summer showcase for 10 actors from Nossoff’s theater classes, who cover a total of 49 roles. Many of the performers are appearing in their first show. They range from a skinny, shapely teen with braces on her teeth to a dapper, graying gent who might be a grandfather.

Props are almost nonexistent. Costumes are off-the-rack. Fancy theater it ain’t, but this unpretentious show does make for a short evening of well-paced, light-hearted fun, with several good laughs along the way. Whether you credit it to good attitude or beginners’ luck, that’s nothing to sneeze at.