Size Doesn’t Matter! Seven Shorts by DC Playwrights doesn’t have a unifying theme, beyond the four authors’ city of residence. While the show as a whole is an enjoyable 60 minutes, an exceptionally strong final short made this reviewer wish she was seeing a collection of plays by people from D.C. about D.C.

The show is a breezy collection of shorts that, for the most part, members of Fully Charged Productions perform well. From a sassy back-and-forth between an actress and the actor charged with collecting headshots at an audition, to an interaction between a shopgirl and a woman shopping for a coat made up of just snippets of sentences (“Isn’t it ju-?” “Uh huh.”), the majority of the shorts are at least built around solid concepts. A surreal short about the unbearable dullness of working in an office in which both the Mac and bonsai tree can speak doesn’t always hit the mark, but at least the idea behind it is thought-provoking enough to justify the talking computer and plant. That much can’t be said for many Fringe shows which scream “Look at me! I’m creative!” without anything to back it up.

While the first six shorts are perhaps not worth the entire $17 cost of admission on their own, the final selection, “Intersections,” left me feeling satisfied. A monologue delivered by 14th Street corridor, taking the form of a Mafia wise guy, tackles the dreaded “gentrification” with jokes that make you laugh then sigh. For example: An imagined replacement of the former H Street Playhouse with a Panera Bread. Because who can be sad about gentrification when you’re eating soup out a bowl made of bread?

It proved to me that the best Fringe shows are the ones that keep it local. Sure, a meta-commentary on playwriting may go over well with some audiences, but in a theater on H Street NE, jokes about the streetcar can’t miss.

Size Doesn’t Matter! is playing at the Atlas Performing Arts Center’s Sprenger theater. Remaining performances:

Saturday, July 19 8:15 p.m.
Saturday, July 26 6:30 p.m.