By Robert Avila

SINCE 1997, Golden Thread Productions has devoted itself to theater exploring Middle Eastern culture and identity as expressed and encountered worldwide. The company's annual "ReOrient" festival of short plays, now in its seventh year, has been a season staple that just gets stronger. The six eclectic playlets now up at the Magic Theatre boast a consistent level of quality in both writing and production that raises the bar over more uneven programs in years past.

George Crowe's Parable for a Dark Time (one of several new works by local playwrights) unfolds as an abstract piece for three actors (Joshua Lenn, Valerie Weak, and Carolyn Zola) whose strange appearances, measured movements, and modulating voices conjure up the mental processes of a man suffering a harrowing solitary confinement. Abducted by unknown assailants and thrown into the utter darkness of a rat-infested dungeon, the prisoner (about whom we learn only a few details) comes face to face with his own shattered identity.

The scenario has its disturbingly contemporary and concrete associations, but ultimately the darkness itself becomes the antagonist here, one a dissolving psyche must simultaneously keep at bay and use as raw material "to carve out my own existence." Director William Selig's fluid staging and able performances keep Crowe's beautifully written internal dialogue unfolding with a sense of weightlessness, insubstantiality, endless motion, and possibility – coaxing the audience toward the protagonist's position, likened at one point to "a blind person reading a mystery novel, relishing every new turn of the plot."

Next, the confessions of an American antiwar activist, wrestling with the full moral and strategic implications of the phrase "Support Our Troops," plays out in yet another state of ironical isolation. Yussef El Guindi's Sniper is essentially a dramatic essay slyly couched as a one-sided "dialogue" between a mild-mannered antiwar activist named John (William Todd Tessler) and a female friend who's gone inexplicably missing (possibly the victim of activist burnout, though whatever the reason, her absence means that John's words are really directed at us). For the duration of the play's 25 minutes, John mills around his empty apartment speaking into a portable memo recorder or leaving semidemented voice mail messages for his missing colleague, only gradually circling in on the crux of the matter: an encounter with an Iraq war veteran, trained as a sniper, that's pushed him into a fever of introspection and an epiphany at once personal and political. Hal Gelb directs this humor-filled but honest and riveting reflection on the deep psychological roots of militarism.

Two outright comedies don't delve as deeply into the murkiness and flux of identity as the plays above, but succeed admirably on their own terms. Enrique Uruéta's rapid-fire satire Learn to Be Latina, sharply directed by Mary Guzmán, tells the very funny (if 5 or 10 minutes too long) story of a 22-year-old Lebanese American (Carolyn Zola) who auditions for pop stardom before a trio of record industry execs (Noah James Butler, Lawrence Radecker, and Valerie Weak). This gaggle of gargoyles in business suits can't wait to make her the next big thing when it suddenly strikes them that she's "ethnically ambiguous" but "not in a fun way." Enter the Ethnic Consultant (Tiffani Sierra, hoisting a far-too-unambiguous Irish brogue) to serve as Mephistopheles with a sock puppet.

In Golden Thread artistic director Torange Yeghiazarian's Call Me Mehdi, meanwhile, a young Iranian American woman (Ahou Tabibzadeh) faces a nocturnal interrogation in bed by her culturally insecure Anglo American husband (Butler) who'd like certain Persian jokes explained to him, please. Despite a faint ending, this 10-minute comic exercise in culturally thick description and latent stereotypes has a smart and generous deadpan humor that recalls Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis series (with maybe a touch of Doonesbury).

The identity mix continues during deliberations in the men's room – between best man Vasken (Mark Rafael Truitt), young doctor Sevag (Radecker), and hyperpatriot Rosdom (Josh Ergas) – at a Glendale, Calif., wedding. Shahé Mankerian's Worm, the most straightforward drama of the evening, uses light comedy and the male and ethnic solidarity between three Armenian American friends to explore tensions around cultural miscegenation, as Rosdom challenges their pal the groom's wisdom in marrying outside the community. As their powwow grows in complexity, its increasingly raucous energy and nausea draws as much from deep cultural and personal anxiety as the high-spirited celebration underway outside (convincingly present in Ian Walker's ambient sound design). Laura Hope directs, with keen assurance, five strong performances in all.

The evening's strongest dramatic impact comes in playwright Naomi Wallace's A State of Innocence, beautifully directed by Isis Saratial Misdary, during a strange and dreamlike meeting between an Israeli soldier (Truitt), a Palestinian mother (Bella Warda), and a lonely but remarkably spry 96-year-old architect (Tessler) in the middle of a dilapidated West Bank zoo. Wallace already demonstrated remarkable sensitivity and perspicacity on the subject of the Israeli-Palestine conflict in her monologue Between the Eyes, a highlight of last year's festival, and here she creates a highly lyrical but unsentimental piece, geared to the underlying dynamics of power, whose nonrealistic style has an intriguing and finally devastating dramatic immediacy.

'ReOrient 2005: Seventh Annual Festival of Short Plays' runs Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m. (no shows Wed/23-Thurs/24); Sun., 7 p.m. Through Dec. 4. Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF. $10-$30. (415) 626-4061, www.goldenthread.org.