HOUSTON -- Main Street Theater has just announced its choices for "A Festival of One Act Plays" to run Mar. 12 - April 5. All three plays selected involve the theme of hearth-and-home.

Leading the trio is The Virtuous Burglar, by 1997 Nobel Prize Winner Dario Fo, the Italian satirist. Skewering domesticity and celebrating anarchism, the play follows the misadventures of a would-be thief whose criminal pursuits are interrupted first by his wife, who calls in mid-burgle, then by homeowners, who return to their domicile at separate moments to commit their own illicit affairs.

Enough Is Enough, by Protais Asseng of Cameroon, blends contemporary French comedy with traditional African storytelling as it asks: can a man become pregnant? This absurdist play, an argument for family planning, was initially translated into English for the Ubu Repertory Theater in 1985. Asseng was born in 1946 and wrote the political satire in 1978 while studying engineering in Paris.

Trifles is a murder mystery by American Susan Glaspell in which a lonely woman is accused of killing her uncaring husband. Glaspell was a founding member of the Provincetown Playhouse (its major contributor/discovery was Eugene O'Neill), a revolutionary troupe; consequently she experiments by having the accused remain offstage. The "trifles" of her life become the key to solving the mystery.

"A Festival of One Act Plays" runs at Main Street Theater in Houston Mar. 12 - Apri1 5. For tickets, $11 - $17, call (713) 524-6706. -- By Peter Szatmary
Texas Correspondent