PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- The folks at the Elemental Theatre Collective sure like a challenge. For their current festival of new "gogo" plays, three writers were assigned at random a shared location -- a cabin -- and two of the seven Catholic Sacraments to base their one-act plays on.

What they came up with in a relatively short time is a couple of hours of theater that holds lots of rewards.

I'll have to admit, I was expecting something different, something more akin to goofy tossed-together skits that didn't always hang together. But I was pleased to find three well-crafted plays that were as clever as they were engaging, with fine casts, to boot.

First up was George Brant's "The Cabin," perhaps the most polished entry of the lot. Brant is an award-winning playwright working for the first time with Elemental Theatre, a local company that just put on a terrific production of "Amadeus" at Beneficent Congregational Church.

A couple spends the weekend in a secluded family cabin. While sitting by the fire, talk turns to a teenage romance the wife had with a local boy. The boy was later killed by a hit-and-run driver, but that didn't end their relationship. The play's a little Twilight Zone-ish, perhaps, but very skillfully pulled off.

And what makes it all the more a winner was the nicely modulated dance between leads D'Arcy Dersham and Alexander Platt as husband and wife Karen and Scott. Platt at first teases Dersham about her past, and playfully tries to pull out more info, until he realizes he has probably heard more than he wants to. And Dersham goes from coyly discussing her nerdy boyfriend to gradually admitting to behavior that makes her husband blush.

Platt wrote the second entry RedPop, which takes its name from a kind of soda found in the cabin's kitchen cabinet. This was in some ways the hardest play to wrap your head around. Molly, a young, unmarried woman (Kelly Seigh) retreats to a cabin to deal with her pregnancy. Her neat-freak boyfriend (Dave Rabinow) shows up to talk things over.

Meanwhile, Platt, as a member of the cast, drifts in and out of the action like an apparition in an orange prison jump suit. He plays Molly's former teacher, who is now doing time for sleeping with his students. He is there to support her in an odd way, and to force her to accept things about herself.

The last and longest play came from Dave Rabinow, the house guitarist who lead the cast in folk songs before the start of the show and during breaks. This brought Dersham back to the stage as a hippie who has dropped out and moved to a cabin. Soon a friend from a commune where she lived (Melissa Bowler) comes knocking at her door, and before you know it, they've jumped into the sack together.

An on-again-off-again relationship ensues, in a play that is sometimes a little schmaltzy, and that definitely has a hokey ending. And there were slow moments when the two women sat around listening to Beatles albums.

All in all, though, "The Father, the Son and the Holy Go.Go," as the trio of plays has been dubbed, makes for a really entertaining night of theater, some of the best stuff to appear at Perishable Theatre in a while. I could see an expanded version of Brant's play ending up at a place like Trinity Rep.

The festival is just shy of two hours with a short intermission. And it's definitely worth checking out, if for no other reason to get a bead on some of the rising talent around here.

"The Father, the Son and the Holy Go.Go" runs through Feb. 7 at Perishable Theatre, 95 Empire St., Providence. Tickets are $15. Call (401) 447-3001.