"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.

Read the full review here.

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. E., Olympia,
360.786.0151