Offering everything from slapstick sight gags to witty one-liners, this diverse quartet of shows has a common ground: they're all funny and insightful, albeit in very unique ways.

California Theatre Center's Summer Rep opened June 6 with Alan Ayckbourn's television satire Comic Potential and continues with the June 13 premiere of Lost in Hollywood, a new, original comedy about the early movie industry by CTC founder and general director Gayle Cornelison. Rounding out the Summer Rep is the classic French farce The Miser by Molière, opening June 20, and ART by Yasmina Reza, an urbane meditation on art and friendship, opening July 5. Premieres of each show are offered on the day preceding the opening date.

Cornelison says the inspiration for California Theatre Center to stage such a wide-ranging lineup came from several sources. "Two of the plays—ART and Comic Potential—I had seen in London with our CTC London tours. I thought that both were wonderful and wanted to produce both when the rights were available to CTC, and both were available to us this summer. The Miser is one of my favorite comedies and has been a comic icon for at least 400 years and the basis for many theatrical shows, including Hello Dolly," says Cornelison. "Three of the plays center on the creation of works of art, and The Miser is about a man who is comical largely because he is totally materialistic, with no aesthetic values."

One of the plays about creating art is art created by Cornelison himself. Lost in Hollywood, a humorous tribute to the golden age of the silver screen, tells the story of an aspiring young actor who comes to Hollywood at the advent of the talkies and finds the business of movie-making to be not quite as picture-perfect as he expected. "Lost in Hollywood is about a more innocent age populated with wild and wonderful characters, but it is also about the rather egocentric, glamorous world of the movies and movie stars that were already a part of the 1930s," says Cornelison. "The would-be movie stars are enamoured of this world and willing to do almost anything to be a part of it."

Cornelison says the play was inspired by his own affinity for the early days of the motion picture business. "I'm extremely interested in the beginnings of the movie industry in Hollywood, starting in the first years of the 20th century to the middle 1930s, when sound and Technicolor pictures were being developed."

The Summer Rep takes audiences from revisiting the beginnings of the movies to envisioning the future of television. Comic Potential depicts a time not too long from now in which android actors are the stars of most TV shows in a commercially motivated system meant to turn out programs that are more product than art (already perhaps not too hard to imagine). But a pesky spark of humanity creeps in when one of the robotic actors begins to exhibit a sense of humor.

ART proves the saying that brevity is the soul of wit. (So witty is ART, in fact, that it picked up the 1998 Tony for best play.) In a mere 90 minutes, this tight comedy transforms one long argument, a stand-off between three friends over the merits of an expensive painting that one of them has purchased, into an exploration of friendship, culture, and, of course, art.

Molière's The Miser, a 17th-century classic, is the tale of a notorious cheapskate whose avarice disrupts the lives of everyone around him. Of course, it's not hard to guess who pays in the end.

The company offers a full season of theater for students and families, with regular shows at its home base in Sunnyvale. A shortened version of Lost in Hollywood will be part of that season for 2003­04.

The company also offers year-round educational programs for young people that include classes, summer theater conservatories, and even an annual theater tour of London. CTC also has a touring company that presents productions throughout the country and internationally, as well as at a number of venues in the Bay Area.

"The goal of our programs is to offer extremely positive and life-affirming experiences for students and families," Cornelison says.

The CTC Summer Rep runs June 5 through July 27 at the Sunnyvale Community Theatre, 550 E. Remington Drive, Sunnyvale. Tickets are $18­$25. For more information, call 408.720.0873 or visit www.ctcinc.org.