In the second or third grade at my school, all the kids had to memorize a Shel Silverstein poem. Mine was about how to get out of washing the dishes. I still know it, and recited it for my friend during intermission at Method Machine and Stasz/Pruitt Productions' staging of "An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein." The children's poem is way tamer than anything you'll see at the show, held upstairs at Nasty D's on Alexander & Broadway. But it still has a tinge of naughtiness to it.

The 10 sketches that make up "An Adult Evening" can be naughty at times, but more often are a fun mix of the absurd and the more mundane moments in life. Case in point: in one sketch, a woman goes to pick up her clothes at a laundromat, only to discover that she's brought them not to a "Wash & Dry" but a "Watch & Dry," where, to her horror, the woman behind the counter has deduced several personal things from the contents of her laundry bag.

Some other standouts: "The Best Daddy," a bit about a girl turning 13 who's presented with a dead pony (or so her dad makes her think), and "Buy One, Get One Free," in which two street-girls solicit a man talking only in rhymes.

I'm no theater critic, but the cast of seven actors did a great job of shifting roles at the drop of a hat. They had shared duties that included adopting very different personas, and even different accents. And in "Thinking up a Name for a New Act," they only had two words to work with: "meat" and "potatoes." These were uttered in such a clever variety of ways, that before you knew it, an entire story had been told.

The production was generally laugh-out-loud hilarious, but at times became jarring: in "The Lifeboat is Sinking," a woman forces her husband to choose who he'd throw overboard in morbid life-or-death, lost-at-sea situation. The scene was dark enough to begin with. It became even darker when it started pouring rain outside.

"An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein" runs through August 2 at Nasty D's. For more information check the Method Machine website.