One-man theater performances like the ones going on in festival format at the Theatre Off Jackson right now require a lot of imagination from the audience. Imagine that there's a huge fantastical set, imagine that the person the actor is having a conversation with isn't the very same actor with a modified posture and voice and standing on the other side of the room. Imagine that you're there in the first place, for most of you, which is a mistake because SPF is a great new festival in only its second year.

In Boom Andrew Connor of Bellingham gives your imagination muscles a lot to work with. In fact, he does the heavy lifting and imagines a world where bombs can do a lot more than blow stuff up, and small towns can be revitalized and then victimized by local space stations. The conceit of Connor's play is that bombs can do anything. They can paint a wall, attract bugs or, of course, blow stuff up, among other things. His main character is a bomb maker hired on at the new space station in town to take down the competition, but not by blowing stuff up; this bomb maker's got morals and a little protégé niece to set an example for. Employment at the space station requires compromise after compromise, though (ain't that the way), and eventually he has to chose between his posh job and the state-of-the-art bomb lab they've set him up with and his personal convictions. Not much of a cliff-hanger there, but the way Connor makes it come about is inventive and fun.

Boatload by Jayson McDonald is a big hilarious mess, full to bursting with dead-on characterizations of lots of people who probably don't exist, but after watching McDonald tear through them we found ourselves thinking that they really should. The world would be a funnier place. A struggling actor, his dad, his girlfriend, his cat, his vet, his old stoner buddy; they're all passengers on the boat referenced in the title, piloted alternately by a drunken cruise ship captain and the actor himself. The story of the cat who needs the operation for which the actor can't pay without embarking on a begging spree through the people in his life is cute, but kind of beside the point here. This is a 60 minute audition, and, if we were casting, McDonald would come away with five or six roles.

Boatload and Boom both play tonight and tomorrow at 7pm at the Theatre Off Jackson. Saturday McDonald will perform his Giant Invisible Robot from last year's SPF alongside Boom and Suzanne Morrison's Yoga Bitch. Tickets are $15 for an evening.