Double dose of one-acts let two women shine.

Byline: Theater review by Dorothy Velasco For The Register-Guard

IT'S ALWAYS an advantage if a playwright can write a role with an actor in mind. While Barratt Walton lives in the Netherlands, she is well acquainted with the abilities of Nancy Hopps and Sparky Roberts. Her newest one-act plays are tailor-made for them.

Together, the plays constitute "Deux Femmes," now playing at the Lord Leebrick Theatre. The French title is apt, because each play has a French connection.

The lighter of the two, "The Price of Admission," features Roberts as the self-styled Tosca, a character loosely based on `the happy hooker,' Xaviera Hollander.

Tosca, after more than 20 years in Los Angeles playing small roles in porn movies and catering meals to the porn crews, has returned to her family property in Drain, where she is opening a French restaurant. Tosca knows her way around a grill, but she's never cooked anything more French than a fry.

No problem. Tosca is nothing if not inventive. She flits around her living quarters at the back of the restaurant, trying on hats and shoes like a manic Mr. Rogers. She flurries, she twirls, she tries out a French accent, she poses, she collapses, all the while talking on the phone, yelling out the door and devising a little friendly blackmail.

To her credit, Roberts manages to make Tosca thoroughly charming and sympathetic. Hey, life is hard. If Tosca needed to work her way through high school performing sexual acts for a fair wage, who can blame her?

Roberts spreads her natural warmth throughout the theater in this sweetheart of a role, one that Lucille Ball would have loved. Director Marc Siegel, best known as a dancer-choreographer, brings all the lightness and startling humor of his dances to his adroit direction of this play.

Hopps is equally charming in "Raw Canvas," the far more serious story of Rosalyn, a talented painter inspired by Walton's own mother-in-law, Australian artist Helen Marshall.

We meet Rosalyn as she is waiting for a moving van to take her and her 3-year-old son to the ship that will return them from France to Canada, back to her husband and teen-age daughter. Meanwhile, Rosalyn frantically tries to capture the light in one last painting.

Rosalyn is torn and tormented; indecision rides her shoulders like a load of bricks. She has been studying and painting in France for nine months, thanks to a kind husband who will never understand her. She has no money of her own. She has her young son to protect, and her daughter at home is growing up without a mother.

If she goes home, she sacrifices her art, her reason for living. If she stays, she loses her daughter, her security and her uncommunicative husband. She says, "Marriage is an awful business, I think. It worked better when everyone died by 40."

In addition to acting in "The Price of Admission," Roberts directs "Raw Canvas." Although the crisis in Rosalyn's life is serious, Roberts moves her gracefully from the intense moments to flights of joy expressed by Irish songs and dance. Rosalyn says, after all, that she is one-fourth Irish, and one-half when excited.

The play becomes a bit too compressed during the climax; there's a lot of emotional territory to cover in just an hour. It's a rich but difficult work that Walton undoubtedly will continue to polish.

"Deux Femmes" runs only through this weekend, so make your ticket reservations soon for an amusing and thoughtful evening.

Dorothy Velasco of Springfield is a playwright who reviews theater for The Register-Guard.

DEUX FEMMES

WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday

WHERE: Lord Leebrick Theatre, 540 Charnelton St.

HOW MUCH: $8 and $12

(465-1506)