Loneliness, as an old Jewish proverb says, breaks the spirit. In Paul Manuel Kane’s new play, “Sam’s Romance,” set in Greenwich Village in the early 1950s, an awkward middle-aged Jewish housewares/hardware store owner, Sam (Ed Kershen) falls for his 20-year-old African-American female clerk, Natalie (Oni Brown). But Sam’s cousin Rose (LeeAnne Hutchison) — who is trapped in an unhappy marriage with a wounded vet, Joe (Todd Licea) has another agenda for her cousin — involving her brassy friend Luba (Neva Small).

Against the most insurmountable odds, everyone in Hollywood is trying to peddle a screenplay. In Catherine Schreiber and Josh Grenrock’s one-act stage comedy at the Union Square Theatre, “Desperate Writers,” a pair of frustrated authors, who are also lovers, take extreme measures to win a hearing for their film script. When the show ran two years ago at the Edgemar Theater in Santa Monica, with Schreiber and Grenrock both in the cast, F.