FIVE MORE SHOWS WE'VE CAUGHT AT THE HOLLYWOOD FRINGE FESTIVAL BY LYLE ZIMSKIND

Set in some San Bernardino County suburban nowheresville (rather than in the titular sin city), Brendan Beseth’s long one-act A Vegas Kind of Love gives us a steamy love quadrangle with richly drawn characters and a pervasive noir atmosphere.
Nadiya Geldenhuys is the unnamed bad girl with a shady past and three different men crazy for her. Nebbishy yet upstanding Leo (Matt Doherty) brings her back from Vegas to live with him and offers a secure home and respectability, plus maybe a car if she plays her cards right, even though she demurs from sleeping with him. Their more aggressively virile neighbor Frank (Nicolas Read), provides her a sexual go-to during the days when Leo’s at work and entreats her to run off with him because she “needs a real man around her, somebody like me.” Leroy a.k.a. Slim (Kofi Boakye) is the hardened criminal boyfriend she’s left Vegas to get away from. As the play progresses, some of these dynamics shift.
There’s also a detective (Henry LeBlanc) sitting at the bar off to the side in the Three Clubs nightclub space (our favorite Hollywood Fringe venue, by the way), where A Vegas Kind of Love is being produced. Older and more cynical than our main characters, his occasional observations and his own story to tell serve as a framing device for the central narrative, which he eventually gets mixed up in himself.
This really is a good, compelling play, and all five actors turn in excellent performances. Director Eddie Kehler shrouds the femme fatale and her suitors in a mysterious tension that never dissipates. Do any of these broken characters end up happy or fulfilled? How Vegas would that be?