Even if the first five comedies of Sex, Death weren't entertaining, they'd be worth sitting through just to get to the final one—a mean little script by Shel Silverstein that begins with a father giving his daughter the world's worst birthday present: a dead pony. Then things get worse.

Terri Weagant, normally a prolific fringe actor, directs "The Best Daddy" and has pulled awesomely outsized performances from her actors. Ashley Bagwell resembles nothing so much as a demented, middle-aged Orson Welles—jowly and bug-eyed with a turtleneck and stubble—as he tortures his increasingly upset daughter (LaChrista Borgers). The comedy is breathtakingly sadistic.

The other short plays are good, if not as good. The first—by Darian Lindle, the only local writer in the mix—takes place on the set of a vampire-porn film where a pompous director (Jason Harber) cajoles his actual-vampire star (the tall, bald, and imposing Chris Bell). It ends badly. Bell reappears in play number four, by Rinne Groff, as a magician/heartbreaker. "You have skills with your hands," says his one-night stand (Megan Ahiers). "Making people believe things that aren't true," he shoots back. That one also ends badly.

The third play, by Mayo Simon, stretches a swimming metaphor to the snapping point (a couple bobs around the ocean, tethered together; he does all the swimming while she relaxes and reads and gets mad when he asks her to pull her literal weight). The plays of Sex, Death are conspicuously old-fashioned in their gender politics, like they were all written in a prefeminist era: Men are lusty and untrustworthy, women are either vulnerable dupes or manipulative whiners, gays don't exist. Perhaps that's also what makes Silverstein's play more successful than the others. It turns a predictable relationship (fathers loving their daughters) on its head—the evening's only real surprise.