Love on the banks of the Mystic

Director Danielle Fauteux Jacques leans on the beauty of the natural setting to anchor the one acts, and organizes the trio in such a way that the audience is introduced to the power that words can have when they are limited; the way they become nonsensical when overused, and finally, when controlled by machines, how words can make people do ridiculous and absurd things.

In the first play, “Humulus the Mute,’’ Humulus (an innocent-looking Andres Rey Solorzano), is only able to speak one word each day. When he falls in love, he decides to save up his words for one month so that he can use them to declare his affection for his bicycle-riding love, Helene (Veronica Barron), with comic results.

For the second play, “Jack, or the Submission,’’ the audience moves down to the pier for a more traditional living room setting in Ionesco’s madcap tale of a young man (Vladimir Noel) whose family outlines the ways in which he’s disappointed them in a jumble of non sequiturs and contradictory statements. At one point, his mother, says, “I’m completely half desperate,’’ and the swirl of words escalates from there. The family sets him up with a bride named Roberta (Scarlett Redmond), but Jack rejects her because she has only two noses. When his in-laws present him with their “second only daughter,’’ who has three noses (also Roberta), Jack resists until Roberta woos him with word games that reduce everything to the word “cat.’’ In a classic Ionesco moment, the entire family is transformed into a collection of mewing and crying cats, as words are replaced by the emotional whining of animals.