Tony Kushner does not write tiny, even if a collection of five of his short plays is being performed under the umbrella title Tiny Kushner at Berkeley Rep. In these plays, written at different times for different projects, Kushner takes us to the moon with the Queen of Albania for starters, and into Laura Bush's brain, by way of Dostoyevsky, as a finale. They are, respectively, the slightest and most provocative of the pieces, but they share a theatrical conductivity that can run low between these bookends.

Kushner, by his own admission, is not drawn to the short form of playwriting. But the luxuriousness of his dialogue and the keenness of his intellect have made inviting such lengthy works as Hydriotaphia, Homebody/Kabul, and, of course, Angels in America. From his relatively small body of short plays, Kushner and director Tony Taccone selected five for the Tiny Kushner project that originated earlier this year as part of a Kushner Celebration at Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater.

Taccone, an instrumental force in the original production of Angels in America, is also the artistic director of Berkeley Rep, and he has kept intact the original Minneapolis cast of Tiny Kushner for its West Coast premiere. In the case of actresses Valeri Mudek and Kate Eifrig, that was a wise choice. On the other hand, more interesting performances might have resulted in locally recasting the male roles that Jim Lichtscheidl and J.C. Cutler are continuing to play.

Not coincidentally, Mudek and Eifrig comprise the cast of the opening and closing plays cited favorably above, as their evocative performances help illuminate Kushner's dialogue. In the curtain-raiser, Eifrig plays the imperiously stern Geraldine, Queen of Albania, while Mudek plays the free-spirit performer Lucia Pamela, who claimed to have recorded her one album on the moon. These actual personages both died in 2002, and Kushner locates their afterlife encounter on the moon as their humorously conflicting personalities eventually find lunar harmony.

In Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy, the final play of the evening, Eifrig takes on the role of a soft-hearted Laura Bush as she brings literacy outreach, by reading an except from The Brothers Karamazov, to the spirits of three dead Iraqi children, while a beatific Mudek serves as a kind of celestial interpreter. Written shortly after the start of the Iraq War, the play may seem to be attacking a soft target, but it turns out to be painfully incisive as it examines the mental and emotional hoops through which the First Lady must jump to justify her husband's choices.

The other three plays each possess intriguing elements that don't quite discover a dramatic fission. In the meandering Terminating or Sonnet LXXV or Lass Meine Schmerzen Nicht Verloren Sein or Ambivalence, a troubled therapist tries to end her relationship with a sexually conflicted patient as their respective mates look on. Dr. Arnold A. Hutschnecker in Paradise offers an afterlife session between Richard Nixon's real-life psychiatrist and an angel-therapist that stumbles in its transparent comedy and J.C. Cutler's uninviting physical humor. Jim Lichtscheidl admirably, if not excitingly, plays multiple roles in the tax-cheat comedy East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis: a little teleplay in tiny monologues.

The plays have been staged on rather bare sets that don't provide the production with an enriching visual domicile. But when the words are there, the sets don't much matter, and in the case of Tiny Kushner, that is about half the time.

Tiny Kushner will run through Nov. 29 at Berkeley Rep. Tickets are $33-$71. Call (510) 647-2949 or go to www.berkeleyrep.org.