"What's your deal?" one wounded character asks another in Israel Horovitz's Six Hotels, currently making its West Coast premiere at Harlequin Productions in Olympia.  It's an apt tag line for Six Hotels, a disparate collection of one-act plays.  If this anthology has any single uniting theme, it's the exposure of clandestine desires, motivations and major malfunctions.

Oh, sure, all six one-acts are set in bland hotel rooms from Massachusetts to Lebanon, and they feature the same four actors (playing 21 roles), but they reside at polar ends of the tonal spectrum.  As Horovitz explained in a post-show talkback, they were written separately and given common elements (fiddlehead ferns, a bottle of red wine) in polish drafts.  Horovitz's daughter, Hannah, lives in Olympia, and he and director Scot Whitney developed a fruitful working relationship when Harlequin debuted his Sins of the Mother last year.

"It's obvious to me," Horovitz writes in the program notes, "the best actors are easily found in Olympia, Washington." 

Well, that may be overstating his case, but it's certainly true he found four good ones for this show.  David Nail, a veteran of several productions of Sins of the Mother including Harlequin's, displays an exceptional talent for portraying subtle differences between believable characters.  It's one thing to create a neurotic oddball, as Nail does perfectly well in the final one-act, quite another to craft a handful of tic-free, even mundane, individuals.  Helen Harvester brings her knack for physicality, richly demonstrated in Mating Dance of the Werewolf, to roles that include an abandoned mistress and petrified violinist.  Incidentally, if Harvester wasn't really playing violin, it was as convincing an example of stage fakery as I've ever seen.  Caitlin Frances is likewise credible accompanying Harvester on cello and tap-dancing through "The Audition Play."

Brian Claudio Smith's characters are shockingly diverse, from a moonlighting bellhop to an ugly American student whose racial pride is expressed at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way.  Some of Six Hotels' overnight guests are unrepentantly cruel, yet we find ourselves rooting for them to atone.  It's to Horovitz's great credit that he's willing to disappoint us often enough to keep the conflict real and unpredictable.  These one-acts are never less than entertaining (as befits a much-lauded playwright who's had over fifty plays produced since 1974) and one of them is flat-out electric, even willfully provocative.  "People really act out when they go to hotels," Horovitz warns, and some of his characters rip themselves psychologically naked.

Jill Carter's lighting and Nate Kirkwood's scenic designs enable smooth transitions, though some of the crosses in and out of flashbacks in "Speaking of Tushy" struck me as awkwardly meta.

Israel Horovitz may be the only 70-year-old playwright hip enough to name-check Dave Chappelle. (Son Adam Horovitz, stage-named Ad-Rock, is - after all - hip enough to be one of the Beastie Boys.)  Harlequin recently announced its upcoming season, which includes the master's Unexpected Tenderness - a "charming family comedy ... punctuated by a tragic complexity" - so it appears his relationship with Scot Whitney and Harlequin is built to last, a world-class feather in Olympia's cap.  This production of Six Hotels is part of "The 70/70 Horovitz Project," for which theaters all over the world will stage or read 70 of Horovitz's plays to celebrate his 70th birthday. 

Let's hope he makes it past an even 100/100.

Six Hotels

Through May 29, 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, 3 p.m., Sunday, 3 p.m. pay-what-you-can performance Saturday, May 15, $22-$33
Harlequin Productions - State Theater, 202 Fourth Ave. East, Olympia
360.786.0151