Laylah Muran de Assereto Photo by Stephen Drewes

In "The Hand of God," we meet Celia, a small-town antique dealer who has definite ideas on what she will and will not carry in her shop (yes to good cottage furniture and clocks "of course" but no to pictures, teddy bears, and definitely none of those little jars of chutney). Laylah Muran de Assereto, as Celia, rattles her words rapidly almost without breath in a very British accent, and her non-stop sentences come out with a musical lift, easily covering several octaves in spoken, vocal range in the same sentence. Celia attentively visits all aging, ailing ladies of her town (especially as they seem surely to be approaching St. Peter's gate), scrupulously eyeing the legs of tables, the backs of bed headboards, and the bottoms of dishes to ascertain the make, the year, and the possible price she might someday soon get. Of course, that means convincing a maid, a cousin, or someone that once the time has come, her shop should be the final resting place for all the belongings she deems of some worth.

Next to her chair on the empty stage sits a small table with a chest. From that chest as lights go down periodically and Bobby McFerrin's vocals of familiar classical tunes fill the air, Celia changes earrings and necklaces. Her story then continues, including one ditty where her voice becomes even more intense and high in pitch. She tells us about an odd drawing she got of a finger that happened to be in a frame she did find interesting. She practically giggles as she explains that a young man in his twenties comes into her shop acting very excited about a table the framed, silly picture was sitting on. Promising to come back to get it later, he suddenly decides first to give her one hundred pounds for the frame and finger. Believing she has duped yet again someone to pay much more than the item is really worth, Celia is soon to be in for a huge shock that will make her famous in headlines across the country. Ms. De Assereto never misses a beat in telling her tale and is so delicious a storyteller, I actually wanted her to stay longer on stage rather than take a bow and leave.

But she had to give way to Miss Fozzard, a woman with slippered feet resting ever so delicately on a small stool while she sits in a chair and in a position that immediately brought Alistair Cooke and Masterpiece Theatre to mind. With tightly curled, bright red hair and alternating her sweaters, blouses, and shawls during her monologue, Anne Larson is a woman obsessed with caring for the health of her feet as we will discover in "Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet." As a department store clerk in soft furnishings, she sees nothing odd about her weekly trips to a podiatrist, even though she is also now the caretaker of her sullen, stroke-suffering brother, Bernard.

When her regular foot doctor must move away, assuring her to find just the right replacement ("I'd hate for those feet to fall in the wrong hands"), she is not that upset when she meets the new foot attender, Mr. Dunderdale, "a refined-looking fellow, 70-odd and with a fine lock of hair." That he soon begins to shower her with new shoes at every visit and then to request she walk on his back as he lies of the floor crying ever more loudly "Yes, Yes, Yes" seems not that odd to her. What is upsetting is how Estelle, who works in floor coverings at the department store, has spread much gossip about her and how her brother seems to be recovering in very strange ways behind locked doors with that young Australian girl she hired as his care-giver. Anne Larson never lets us forget that Miss Fozzard is quite the proper English lady of some distinction, even if she is now taking money when she visits Mr. Dunderdale rather than paying him for his services.

We last meet a vicar's wife, Susan, in "Bed Among the Lentils." Sitting in a straight-back chair with mid-parted, stringy blonde hair, Susan (Susan Maeder) is not shy in telling us that being a parish wife is not all that it is cooked up to be, especially when married to a overly pompous, rather sexless Jeffrey. Not that she sees herself any great catch. "The hair, the wan smile, the flat chest ... You'd think I was just cut out for God himself," she admits to us with an always slightly cocked head. After being cut off at the local shop because her unpaid debts have risen too close to heaven due to her frequents stop-ins for more sherry, Susan goes further afield. She finds a shop run by Mr. Ramesh, a rather gorgeous, twenty-six-year-old Indian immigrant who just happens to have a room with a bed over the shop that he is willing to close early. Mr. Ramesh ends up teaching Susan a thing or two about life and about herself; and the result is career-enhancing for her ambitious husband and infuriating for his doting parish women, the Fan Club. Susan Meader keeps us chuckling as she too changes outfits hung on the hat tree next to her to match the shifting moods of her story.

As a trio, this configuration of Alan Bennett's original Talking Heads at Spare Stage is a crowd pleaser, even if the small audience is not quite crowd-size. Three very different eccentrics spin tales that are funny and mesmerizing at the same time.

Talking Heads continues through March 27, 2016, by Spare Stage at the Royce Gallery, 2901 Mariposa Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available at http://sparestage.com.