From Elegiac Appalachian Hollers to New Terrain

Making Romulus Linney’s “Tennessee” the centerpiece of Series A of the Ensemble Studio Theater’s 33rd annual festival of one-acts was a fine idea.

It pays tribute to Linney, an undervalued playwright who died in January and had a long history with this incubational Off Broadway company. But it also stands as a vibrant example of what superior short-form drama can encompass in terms of narrative density, pithy character development and idiosyncratic authorial voice.

The downside is that even in Harris Yulin’s problematically cast revival, the distinctive homespun Southern lyricism of this 1980 play makes the rest of the patchy program look feeble, though the final two entries do muster a modicum of spark.

Running just under an hour, “Tennessee” opens on a classic Americana tableau. A frontier mother (Julie Fitzpatrick) nurses her baby on a rickety porch in rural North Carolina in 1870, as her husband (Rufus Collins) and teenage son (Eamon Foley) return from a day of working the land.

When an old woman (Kristen Lowman) appears, carrying a cowbell and a shard of broken mirror, they offer her food, and she begins to talk of her youth on that same farm.

Scornful of men, she fended off suitors by swearing she would marry only a husband willing to take her far away to Tennessee. But one man (Scott Sowers) accepted her challenge, taking her on a journey through the wilderness and across the mountains. A lifetime later, she discovers she never traveled far from home.

Having directed a number of Linney’s plays, as well as those of Horton Foote, Mr. Yulin has a natural affinity for a vanishing breed of elegiac regionalists. He seems at home in the haunted hills of Appalachia, where past and present become indistinguishable, even if his actors are not always such comfortable visitors.

Closest to the mark here is Mr. Sowers, whose serene persistence with his reluctant bride carries a strain of sly humor and quiet indomitability. His character is as much a part of the land as any tree or rock.

But Ms. Lowman is an unsatisfying fit for the rawboned old woman, who could be “19 or 90,” as the young farm wife puts it, and whose folksy wisdom as she approaches death may signal madness or lucidity. This transformative central role was previously played by Lois Smith and Frances Sternhagen, actors with the required seen-it-all authority embedded in their DNA. Ms. Lowman too often slips into the cliché of the thigh-slapping, feisty old bird, as if she were channeling Irene Ryan at her orneriest on “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

But unevenness among the performers cannot crush the bracing specificity and evocativeness of Linney’s writing, qualities mostly absent from the other, less substantial plays.

In both Ben Rosenthal’s mannered “Ten High” and J. Holtham’s “School Night” (which plays like a poorly dramatized short story), dialogue that looks smart on the page rarely sounds like the natural voices of these characters. Shown in unflattering contrast to Linney’s textured plotting, these slender exercises remain more tethered to ideas — fate in “Ten High” and belonging in “School Night” — than to people or stories.

Billy Aronson brings welcome economy to his play “In the Middle of the Night,” in which a mother’s surprise visit to her son at college reveals the shocking extent of his emotional instability. And Qui Nguyen’s “Bike Wreck” harnesses the volatile anger of ethnic minorities being squeezed out of a Manhattan increasingly accommodating only to entitled trust-fund kids and Wall Street vipers.

It’s no “Tennessee,” but Mr. Nguyen’s play stands alone among the four new works in representing a clearly defined environment and characters that seem to be a part of it.