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How could I not include the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s vicious little four-character one-acter?

In the second act — originally the 1990 one-acter “Falsettoland” — the witty musical takes a gut-wrenching turn toward life at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Like that one-acter, Mr. Carter’s play asks its characters to look deep into their souls and admit their bad faith.

It was adapted from Thornton Wilder’s play “The Matchmaker,” which grew out of his “The Merchant of Yonkers,” itself adapted from an 1842 Austrian reworking of an 1835 American one-acter.

I urged that our first offering should be a bill of three one-act plays, including Paul Green’s Hymn to the Rising Sun, a grim, poetical, powerful one-acter dealing with chain gang conditions in the South.