The play really is the thing at the Bermuda Musical & Dramatic Society’s annual Famous For Fifteen Minutes festival.

A showcase for nurturing and celebrating local playwrights, this year’s selection of one-act dramas and comedies now being staged at the BMDS Daylesford Theatre demonstrates there’s an abundance of literary talent currently labouring in Bermuda’s theatrical vineyard.

All six of the 36 entries chosen for production in the 2014 competition meet Tennessee Williams’ exacting definition of the playwright’s art: “The colour, the grace and levitation, the structural pattern in motion, the quick interplay of live beings, suspended like fitful lightning in a cloud, these things are the play, not words on paper, nor thoughts and ideas of an author, those shabby things snatched off basement counters at Gimbel’s.”

Yvon Tripper’s Cobbs Hill is an exuberantly joyous reworking of Romeo and Juliet, with the action transplanted to Bermuda and the feuding houses of Montague and Capulet replaced by a vendetta between residents of Warwick and Paget. The dialogue consists of suitably Bermudianised rhyming couplets and contains plentiful pointed local references touching on subjects as diverse as the highly dubious water quality of Warwick Pond to wildcat public transportation strikes.

The sometimes dazzling wordplay notwithstanding, Tripper (aka Chris Dye) never strives for effect, but rather allows the play’s comic possibilities to slowly emerge from its clever transposition of new Bermudian elements into this familiar old story. The four-man cast, Kristen Darrell and Micah Jimenez as the star-crossed lovers, Jenita Dyer as the highly disapproving mother of the Juliet stand-in and Emily Ross as a distaff Friar Lawrence — is equally at ease with the stylised dialogue as they are with the material’s comic possibilities. Carol Birch directs the proceedings with assurance and a mischievous bravado.

Nathaniel Butterfield’s Viewpoint is a minor masterpiece of misdirection and elliptical storytelling, one which underscores the truth of the old Raymond Chandler dictum that “scarcely anything in literature is worth a damn except what is written between the lines”.

Two stormbound women (Lane Martin and Heather Conyers) watch through their cottage’s picture window as conditions outside rapidly deteriorate. Their conversation comprises a series of oblique, Pinter-esque exchanges which move in a purposeful, ever-circling way slowly towards a literally world-shattering denouement.

Attempting to disguise their loneliness, claustrophobia and growing anxiety with forced attempts at bonhomie the women’s efforts to impose order and a sense of normalcy on what is clearly an increasingly disordered situation are pathetically tragicomic. Suffice it to say this is probably how the world will indeed end: not with a bang but an exchange of commonplace banalities about the weather.

Martin and Conyers deliver touchingly affective performances under Sheilagh Robertson’s appropriately restrained direction.

In Hamish McCallum’s Just Deserts a pair of female British veterans of the Iraq campaign (Ariella DeSilva and Nicola Flood) reflect on their bloody experiences in that foredoomed and futile war while pondering their futures on a tropical beach. Mixing social commentary with piercing comic barbs (Justin Bieber is a favourite target), the play takes a wild veer into melodrama and features a somewhat improbable O. Henry-type-twist ending.

The disparate elements gel well, though, and Michah Jimenez — pulling double duty as the director of this play — gets the maximum effect from both the minimalist material and his actors. Flood’s sardonic, rapid-fire delivery of her frequently lacerating lines is particularly effective.

A delightful variation on Pirandello’s Six Characters In Search Of An Author, No Heming Way! is an especially adroit collaboration between Justine Foster and Julia Pitt. Appropriately enough for a play-writing festival, it’s a comic look at the dynamics of creativity, the relationship between characters and their writer and the need for authors to draw on personal experience rather than second-hand sources if they want to produce work of value.

Shawn Angiers shines as a stalled would-be playwright whose characters (Subha Chelvam and Reuben Flood) finally rebel at the absurdly contrived paces he keeps putting them through. Whether he’s attempting to recycle old Noel Coward tropes or abruptly transplanting them and the action from 1920s Lake Como to the Arctic or even a Second World War submarine, every exit for the pair is an entrance somewhere else equally clichéd.

The accountant-turned-writer’s hero and heroine continue to be lumbered with trite dialogue and singularly unconvincing situations until they confront their creator about his habit of literally going by the book (in this instance a small library of Idiot’s Guide-type texts on dramatic structure, characterisations and action). By obsessing about construction and clumsily attempting to ape the style and subject matter of his idol Ernest Hemingway, he is stifling his own creativity, ignoring his own potential sources of inspiration — including a supportive but increasingly bewildered spouse (Nancy Smith).

Laura Bardgett directs with panache and clear, unbridled enjoyment and there’s neither a dull moment nor a dud line in this play within a play within a good-natured master class on the play-writing process.

A poignant vignette about love, loss and longing, its title animal notwithstanding Sheilagh Robertson’s Too Many Elephants is actually as delicate as an origami butterfly. Veteran actors Danjou Anderson and Jenny Burrell-Jones deliver profoundly moving performances as an elderly couple reminiscing on a bench at Albuoy’s Point. The focus of their conversation is a recently deceased childhood friend, the deceptively complex “Bungy” who lived for games of marbles, elephants and, as an adult, her daughter.

Claudia Hall, a relative newcomer to the Bermuda stage, is simply astonishing as Bungy, who regularly interpolates her own story into her friends’ accounts of her life. Hall’s is a polished but graciously understated performance of near-professional calibre. She delivers the play’s intricately wrought monologues — which lead from the near-comic story of a circus elephant loose in Bermuda to a shockingly tragic resolution — with a poetry which complements the lyrical dialogue. Christopher Edwards has directed this exquisite miniature with deftness and sensitivity.

Rounding out the programme, the action of Owain Johnston’s Unfiltered unfolds outside a Hamilton building during what is meant to be an office worker’s keenly anticipated 15-minute cigarette break.

Geoffrey Faiella is in fine comic form as the increasingly frustrated smoker whose enjoyment is foiled first by a dead lighter and then by back-to-back lectures on his increasingly socially unacceptable habit. The first, gently chiding, comes from a reformed smoker and potential love interest (Brittany Ray); the second admonishment, though, is of the fire-and-brimstone variety and delivered by an unrepentantly intolerant new mother (Sharise Clark).

Slowly building exasperation finally erupts into a sustained riposte of near-manic intensity and indignation (think a nicotine-craving Basil Fawlty exploding at hectoring do-gooders rather than Irish builders or German tourists). It’s a ritual catharsis for the ages.

Johnston has a genuine gift for comic dialogue laced with perceptive insights into the human condition — hypocrisy, self-righteousness and the unwritten right to choose our own poisons are all subjected to his witty scrutiny in Unfiltered.

Will Kempe, the longtime Bermudian actor who has appeared on both the big and small screens, brings a clarity, focus and a certain sure-handedness to the play’s direction.

Technical credits and production values for all six plays are top-drawer.?Famous For Fifteen Minutes, currently in its 12th year, gives locals and residents the chance to write a 15-minute play, featuring no more than four characters and with no elaborate sets or props. Six plays are chosen each year by a panel of overseas judges. An overall winner is selected based solely on the quality of the writing.

Tickets to this year’s event, being staged tonight and Saturday and September 3-6, are $25 (or $75 for closing night, which includes a wine and reception) — available online at www.bmds.bm/box-office. Proceeds raised go to the BMDS Charitable Trust which has made more than $250,000 available to university students pursuing degrees in the performing arts and to other related charitable endeavours.