In Line, which opened this past weekend at the Little Theatre at Phoenix Theatre, playwright Israel Horovitz raps America's competitive spirit upside the head.

In the race to be first, everyone's a loser, he says, especially the winners.

Of course, Horovitz has something more profound than ,Monday Night Football in mind. Life, actually. He has seen America's willingness to do whatever it takes to be No. 1 and is appalled. All that scheming and double-dealing, game rigging, and steroid-taking and for what? Maybe you triumph for the moment, but someone better or more devious is guaranteed to wrest the trophy from your hands. Then you die.

Horovitz makes his point in Line, an amusing, thought-provoking play that, in combination with another Horovitz shorty, Acrobats, marks the auspicious debut of Oasis Theatre Company, a professional troupe founded by Greenway High School teacher Esta Rosevear.

Four men and one woman stand in a line. No one's sure what the queue is for, and it doesn't matter. What counts is being first. Like Aussie football, anything goes in the ruthless pursuit of the goal, except these folks are much more likely to do harm to themselves and each other. They're playing with psyches, not pigskins.

Mud sticks. Enough of it suffocates. A quintet of marvelous actors - Richard Hardt, Mike Traylor, Shekie Bishop, Jordan Mann and Gerald Thomson - fling it with such abandon that the audience is forced to duck in shocked recognition - even as it breaks up with laughter.

Most people know they've played by these rules or tried to. They're just too stubborn - or stupid - to admit they've lost

Rosevear's direction is energetic, but never so furious that character nuance is sacrificed. She does even better with Acrobats, the story of a failing marriage played out against the backdrop of the couple's vaudeville routine.

He lies on a bed of nails as she performs various stunts while balancing on his body. Although they hate each other, they are fatally codependent. To leave means to break up the act - in every sense.

Horovitz has invested each word of Acrobats, each action, with multiple meanings. Rosevear and her actors, Cheo Jackson and Tiana Lynton, don't miss a syllable, yet they also have the courage to let sitence speak its piece.

If this is how Oasis means to go on, wise theatergoers will rush to the head of the line.

Kyle Lawson can be reached at (602) 444-8947 or at [email protected] via e-mail.