So at the point that Tulsan Tim Neller's wacky soap opera "Horace and Daphne" featured onstage a father sitting on top of a five-foot-tall egg while swinging a three-wood golf club, seemingly oblivious to his wife's belly dancing for their Marine son in uniform while she served up cabbage rolls and other Lebanese treats for dinner, I had to wonder if a kitchen sink might soon come hurtling out onto the stage and no one would think much of it.
But instead, out hatched a flesh-eating monster that looked like a cross between an obscene baby chick and a green gremlin. It began attacking everyone, and all seemed right with the world.
Or at least in the world created in this 45-minute work. Which was completely different from the world created in the first one-act of the night, a short play by Doug Dolcino, a New Hampshire playwright whose full-length "Beast of Burden" was an audacious and edgy highlight of Heller's 2000-2001 season.
In Dolcino's "Motherland," we are led to believe that Carout and Log are a pair of -- we assume by the accents -- deposed Eastern European princes working as bellboys in an American hotel. In this 30-minute short, we find them talking, arguing and freezing inside a dark coat closet.
Log (John Cruncleton) doesn't want to remember their regal past that ended in exile, speaking as if he's happy to abandon it and embrace American capitalism and other values. Meanwhile, Carout (Corey Douglas) seems to recall fond bits and pieces of their past, but they're murky memories, like possibly he's making some things up as he goes along.
It's difficult to decide what this pair's situation is, exactly, which is the point of this farce. Are they who they say they are, and this is just one inane conversation in a day full of inane conversations between the two? Or are they simply a pair of immigrants with vivid imaginations, who left behind a restrictive motherland for America's freedoms, searching for new identities in comic books?
We'll never know, but it makes for an occasionally amusing little piece that's well-performed and crisply directed by Scott Heberling, but still not as engaging as one would like.
More hearty laughs come in Neller's work, which is so absurd much of the time that you're laughing with it and at it. There are lines of dialogue, especially in a speech near the conclusion, that are so completely ludicrous that they seem the result of playing that word puzzle in which you fill in blanks with nouns and verbs of your choosing to make an incoherent but hilarious phrase.
Laurie Phariss is particularly good in this goofy work's ensemble, which includes Rich Bentz, Mark Miller, David L. Gray, Jesse Pate and Thomas Watts voicing a cranky parrot.
Heller's production of one-acts this year plays fast and loose in exposing the works of new writers, and the result is an evening that's undisciplined and scattershot, dark and troubling and frequently a hoot.
Heller Theater's production of "What in the World: A World Premiere Evening" continues with an 8 p.m. show Saturday, a 2 p.m. matinee Sunday and 8 p.m. performances Thursday-Friday and Nov. 23. Heller Theater is located at 5328 S. Wheeling Ave., and tickets priced at $5-$7 may be reserved by calling 746-5065.
Michael Smith, World entertainment writer, can be reached at 581-8344 or via e-mail at michael.smith@tulsaworld.com.