The formula for Death, Sex should be a winner. Six 10-minute plays about the mort petite and grand—the glory, mess, and ickiness of having a body. Balagan's first go-round with this concept, back in February, was moderately successful: shorts about porn and vampires and one-night stands culminating in Shel Silverstein's glitteringly sadistic The Best Daddy, about a girl who finally gets that pony she's always wanted. Except it's dead. The premise was jarring, but Silverstein's wicked dialogue and twists on the father-daughter relationship pulled the script past its initial shock and made it deep, disturbing, and memorable.

This second shot at Death, Sex lacks that delightfully nasty nadir. The six plays all race for the bottom, but land with a series of clunks. The stories are gross but not clever: In I Saw Mommy by Eric Ankrim, Santa Claus befriends/be-boyfriends a young girl, only to be seduced away when Mommy doses Santa's cookies with ecstasy. (Sample line: "Are you gonna make it a white Christmas all the way down my esophagus this year?") In Consumption, Consumption by Nik Perleros and Davey Young, a clueless praying mantis on his wedding night wheedles his bride into wearing lingerie when all she wants is to eat his brains. In one of the better shorts, Noelle by José Amador, a 36-year-old woman is visited, Scrooge-like, by the ghosts of orgasms past.

As the lights came up, an old man (a very old man) in front of me said to his two gray-haired companions: "I think I'm too old for this stuff. I don't get the references." The thing was, there weren't any references to get. He wasn't scandalized by the material: He just didn't find it funny. recommended