An Evening with Lanford Wilson is one of those worth-the-price-of-admission shows. It's an evening of four one-acts by playwright Lanford Wilson, who is being celebrated by several local theaters this month.

        The performance worth waiting for — and worth twice the $15 ticket — is Deborah Ludwig performing a harrowing monologue in The Moonshot Tape at the top of the second act.

        It's a gorgeous turn, with Ms. Ludwig inhabiting the role of Diane, a famous writer visiting her small Missouri hometown. She uses the occasion to submit to an interview by a reporter from the high school newspaper.

        The eager, invisible interviewer has dutifully submitted a list of innocuous questions along the lines of “How has growing up in a small town prepared you for living in a large urban city, or not?”

        As Diane swills vodka and chain smokes, her stream-of-consciousness answers deepen into an outpouring that's more than the poor kid bargained for.

        Family, memory, what we can't leave behind, personal experience as basis for the creative process — Mr. Wilson packs a lot into Moonshot Tape. Ms. Ludwig, beautifully directed by Michael Morehead to use stillness as a powerful tool, delivers every bit.

        The rest of the program is a mixed bag. It's a pleasure to see a theater indulging in an evening of one-acts, which are becoming a lost art. (Ovation has already committed to another in 2001-02.)

        Fans of Mr. Wilson will enjoy the arc of the work, which covers two decades, and the way the playwright experiments with ideas that are expanded on in later work. In Moonshot Tape, the notion of “sympathetic magic” (the theory of “saying makes it so”) would become a full-length play soon after.
       

"A Betrothal'
               The evening opens with A Betrothal, a charming piece about two losing flower breeders who meet after escaping the awards ceremony.

        Mindy Siebert arrives first, fabulously bitter and contemptuous as J.H. Joslyn, a pinched woman who too perfectly fits the stereotype of a school assistant librarian. Ms. Siebert's sneer is a work of art, surpassed only by her ability to take on the mien of an angry bulldog.

        Pity milquetoast Kermit Wasserman (Mike Ward) when he invades her space. Like J.H., Kermit is a perfectly sketched caricature. Kermit is one of those tweedy, bow-tied fellows who skirt around the edges, a sort-of middle-aged wallflower who makes sure his light remains safely hidden away.

        Despite a smooth and affable delivery, Mr. Ward doesn't have much of a feel for Kermit. There was more to be had here.
       

And two misses

               The Madness of Lady Bright can be an outrageously good performance piece as an aging, on-the-rocks drag queen pulls a Blanche DuBois. He cracks up in his sad little apartment where the walls are covered with the autographs of his tricks, and he sighs over his lost true love.

        Kenneth Early is too young, too good-looking and too healthy for the role, but he might have pulled it off if he could act it. He can't. It is a role that, like Diane in Moonshot Tape, must be inhabited.

        The evening closer, Abstinence, is meant to provide a light ending to balance the intensity of Moonshot Tape. It's a little too light, the merest trifle about posh folk surrounded by temptations of choice — prescription drugs, alcohol, food, sex — represented in the four corners of the playing space.

        The skit plays out in rounds (like an extremely short boxing match), with all the characters scrambling for their addictions at intervals. Such fun, so false.

        Blake Bowden performs some impressive pratfalls as the host, and Kate Brauer is funny as close personal friend of both host and hostess. But it looks like muddled, meaningless farce under Mary Lenning's direction.

        An Evening with Lanford Wilson, Ovation Theatre, Fifth Third Bank Theater, through Saturday, 241-7469.

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