[Saturday Night Saloon Series, 11/14/09 (remaining showings 12/12 and 1/9), Brooklyn, USA]

I’m seeing the Vampire Cowboys theatre company’s live movie-serials every other installment, and neither one of us wants to be the first to say shut up:

Dustin Chinn’s sentai pastiche “Let’s Ninja Science Ranger Team Get!” started over-the-top and is heading back up the sides for another plummet, with playground ultraviolence and potboiler overstatement in the capable hands of its frenzied ensemble overall and the post-stooges psychic mayhem of Jon Hoche, Temar Underwood and Paco Tolson in particular.

Crystal Skillman’s IT situation-farce “Hack” has continued to ramify like an unattended NORAD screensaver that’s been accidentally modeling Defcon 1. The storyline is a labyrinth down which characters keep wandering into random genres connected at some distant, divine remove to whatever-the-hell crisis they’re ostensibly averting (or causing and supposedly controlling) — a great metaphor for mass-media’s constant distractions from a semblance of purpose. Best among the roll-call is the newest character since I skipped an episode, the “It’s a Good Life”-style 10-year-old hacker who fixates on pantomiming Hannah Montana in-between bouts of real-life recreational mastery-of-the-universe. Everyone’s sliding into their avatar identities and wishing they’re someone they’re not, who’s nonetheless realer than they are — a splendid source of episodic tension with no existential season finale in sight.

As its overemphasized title telegraphs, Brent Cox’s “Jack O’Hanrahan and the Troubulation of Doom” remains a pure poetry-slam of vague anxiety and cogent malapropism — “An old war buddy whose death was almost tragic”; “The professor they call…The Professor” — too many to mention, but there’s two more to go. On the other hand, shortsightedly pronounced dead here last time, Mac Rogers’ exorcism soap-opera “Mother Sacramento” and James Comtois’ time-travel battlefield melodrama “Entrenched” convinced me of the value of holding on to that cliff; “Sacramento”’s sophisticated setup has swerved into some salutary hysteria and “Entrenched” has reprocessed its slow-build storytelling into genuinely creepy apprehension.

Anchored by an almost episode-length soliloquy from a transcendentally manic Hope Cartelli whose blind-drunk but temporarily cold-turkey character thinks she’s hallucinating the whole scenario, Jeff Lewonczyk’s labcoat-ripper “Lady Cryptozoologist: Season 2” delivered an entire segment-full of sexual Darwinism and Freudian vaudeville; not so much a comedy of errors as of doggedly intentional mis-happenstance, and what else is natural selection for?

I think I’ll miss December so the finales can come as much a surprise to me as to our heroes. There’s always enough mystery if you know where not to look.

[www.vampirecowboys.com/events.htm]