ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) — The Sublime Theater & Press, a local theater company, is currently producing the world premiere of “Fire & Flood,” a pair of plays by Travis Lowe, through Oct. 18 at the BeBe Theatre in downtown Asheville.

“55 Mount Lee Drive” and “Nightlight,” were written in the aftermath of the Los Angeles wildfires and Hurricane Helene, transmuting the disasters into the two short plays.

Tickets for “Fire & Flood” are $21.50 and can purchased here.

“55 Mount Lee Drive” review

In “55 Mount Lee Drive,” the “Fire” half of the production, “a rugged cowboy, a spirited falafel vendor and a whimsical mermaid find themselves entangled in life’s absurdities amidst the burning hills of Mount Lee Drive,” according to the show synopsis. The play was directed by Sublime Theater Artistic Associate Dakota Mann and stars Glenna Grant as the falafel vendor, Jon Stockdale as the cowboy and Olivia Stuller as the mermaid.

For a play built around a real-life tragedy, “55 Mount Lee Drive” was oddly unnatural and narratively disjointed, despite the best efforts of the cast.

For starters, while the setting of the show is literally in the title, nothing about the story felt drawn from anywhere real. While the disparate careers of the three characters, for instance, may just be an unsuccessful gag about LA career paths, in practice their combination was inexplicable. The story is set at the summit of the Hollywood sign, a prominent promenade for tourists, but a strange choice of locale for a falafel pushcart, let alone a sheep farmer. The arrival of the Stuller’s mermaid later on is equally confusing, considering Mount Lee Drive would be a considerably steep, public and arid location for any sort of party requisite of mermaid services.

I’m usually all for magical realism, especially when deployed in theatre, the ultimate magical medium, and the off-center setting of “55 Mount Lee Drive” might have been excusable if the characters were better drawn.

Luci the falafel vendor may as well have been written as a cardboard cutout for all the personality she has, despite Grant’s valiant attempts to grant her character a sort of sly, teasing moxie, and while Stuller is giving her all as Cleodora the maniacal mermaid, the character is too wrapped up in irksome idiosyncrasy to ever feel fully realized. El, meanwhile, the cowboy performed with arrogant aloofness by a drawling Stockdale, was the clearest defined character of the trio, but featured an unintentionally meta character tic: El is prone to telling meandering stories which begin strong, end suddenly and lack a clear point.

“55 Mount Lee Drive” is written precisely the same way.

If the genesis of “Fire & Flood” was building drama around these horrific disasters, “55 Mount Lee Drive” can be flatly considered a disaster itself. The show prompted more confusion than elucidation of what it was like to live through the LA fires.

Thank goodness “Nightlight,” the second play of the evening, is among the most affecting works of theatre I’ve seen all year long.

“Nightlight” review

“Nightlight,” directed by Sublime Theater Producing Artistic Director Steven Samuels, is effectively a one woman show, starring Erin McCarson in the performance of nearly an hour-long soliloquy.

The play is set “in the aftermath of a devastating storm, [where] a lone rescue worker is tasked with guarding a body through the night, in a long, strange vigil filled with introspection, humor and a series of eerie, seemingly supernatural events,” according to the show synopsis.

While the script for the “Flood” show is filled with equally idiosyncratic dialogue as its predecessor, the lines all sound far more natural when delivered as part of a running monologue. That is especially true when the character spouting the disjointed stream-of-consciousness has cause to go a little crazy: Sitting a nighttime vigil for an invisible corpse is the stuff of nightmares, which made it an accurate depiction of Helene right out of the floodgate.

McCarson plays Michel, a volunteer rescue worker assigned to watch a rubble-covered body before the flood victim can be extracted. The set design for the show is spare and all too familiar for Helene survivors, featuring three dark stumps littered around a grey, hulking pile of garbage, artfully arranged in an impressive conical sculpture. The greyscale set, filled in with darkness on the black box theater stage, relied on McCarson’s performance of the quirky, befuddled Michel to bring color to the show.

McCarson is tremendous in the part. Not only does she execute 50 minutes of dialogue without missing a beat, she does it as naturally as a sunrise, illuminating the dark material with a human tenderness and rambunctious sense of humor.

During one particularly memorable beat, Michel is inspired to sing Chappell Roan’s “HOT TO GO!” to the unseen body, an outburst as hilarious as it is mildly disquieting. In another moment, McCarson brought a heartbreaking earnestness to the watch, confessing to and confiding in the unseen body. While Michel did not know the person trapped beneath the pile, she does her best to make up for lost time with what little information she has. The humanization of the dead victim is profoundly affecting, a quiet reminder of the deep, complex personhood of every single life lost to Helene.

Since Helene hit just over a year ago, Western North Carolina has seen every manner of tribute, memorial and recapitulation of the storm attempt to reckon with the weight of surviving the disaster. Even so, what Lowe, Samuels and McCarson have accomplished with “Nightlight” is something new.

“Nightlight” is honest, upsetting, scary and funny, a perfect evocation of our region’s survival without ever careening into saccharine sentimentality. It’s a breathtakingly original love letter to WNC.

For more about “Fire & Flood,” visit www.facebook.com/thesublimetheater.