At the end of the first portion of the Theater, Dance and Performance Studies Department's festival, "Silences and Salutations: Seven One Act Plays," my friend leaned over, grabbed my pen and wrote "What the fuuuck!!??" over my notes.

In a way, it was a response that summed up the overall experience quite ... well, elegantly. After all, each of the seven plays was chosen specifically for its "challenging" nature, which to the non-theater-majoring layman should probably read as code for "real weird."

You are not supposed to extract a plot from Eugene Ionesco's "Salutations." You are not supposed to understand the significance of the audio recordings of the ocean that play randomly (or so it seems) during Gertrude Stein's "What Happened." It's possible you're not supposed to enjoy Samuel Beckett's disembodied "Play." You're probably not even supposed to know whether you enjoyed it, anyway.

So what, then, are you supposed to do? How do you engage with performances that were designed specifically to rebuff all attempts at normal understanding? And why would anyone but the most fun-hating, intellectually masochistic academics subject themselves to stuff like that?

Going into the festival, TDPS definitely had some 'splaining to do. "Silences and Salutations" is broken up into three programs-A, B and C. Each program starts with "Salutations," which is followed by two different plays. Unfortunately, Ionesco's play doesn't do much to soothe the skeptical theatergoer. In premise, it is a logical precursor to the rest of the festival. It starts with a series of commonplace greetings and almost immediately devolves into the actors (Andy Yan Kit Chan, Alisha Ehrlich, Sanford Jackson, Sally O'Connor and Matthew Stevens) miming unrelated activities while literally just listing the longest, most useless adverbs the dictionary has to offer. From time to time, the play breaks the fourth wall when heckling "audience members" yell things like "Anyone could do that!" and "It's just a chance for them to show off."

"Salutations" is pretty straightforward in its challenge to the conventional theater experience; however, its importance in paving the absurdist way for the plays to follow doesn't make it any easier to sit through. Furthermore, the exaggerated miming bears an uncanny resemblance to a high school improv troupe playing some kind of charades game during which they're allowed to speak only in non-sequiturs.

As the festival went on, though, the grating absurdity for absurdity's sake in all three versions of "Salutations" proved to be more the exception than the rule. In most cases, where the scripts largely lack definitive meaning, the performers in "Silence and Salutations" manage to breathe enough life into them to convince the audience to keep looking.

In Program C, Gertrude Stein's "Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters" is, unsurprisingly, totally inscrutable. But director Marc Boucai's staging-not to mention the boundlessly energetic and committed cast (Shiori Ideta, Kristina Thesken, Vahishta Vafadari, Jasen Talise and Nicholas Weinbach)-manages to make something written by the infamous Stein hilarious. In the hyper-abstract play-within-a-play, McIvor takes advantage of Stein's linguistic patterns to toy with modes of creating suspense. This play-within-the-play loops, and for each iteration, the cast acts it out within the context of a different murder movie genre, from a film noir to a parody of "Kill Bill."

While most of the pieces actively resist plot summary, the ones that are discernable draw power from more stream-of-consciousness narrative structures. In Program B's "Silence" by Harold Pinter, the three characters stand next to each other on stage, casually ruminating on their aloneness and occasionally interacting with each other. Rather than telling a clear story of their shared past, bits of the story emerge through vague allusions and melancholy longing. Because the performers (Drew Ledbetter, Gwen Kingston and Jon Lavranos) avoid melodrama, the result is in many ways more poignant than a traditionally relayed love story.

The Program A piece "Devotees in the Garden of Love" also benefits from an ambiguous narrative. Actress Jessica Charles plays a giddy young bride-to-be, George, who watches her suitors literally battling for her hand below, while she observes remotely with her mother, Lily (Kelly Strickland, an employee of The Daily Californian), from a rooftop. It's a surreal depiction of courtship that gets even stranger when George's finishing school mistress and matchmaker Madame Odelia Pandahr (Dekyi Ronge) starts "reporting from the field." At its core, the play's strangeness reinforces its simultaneously touching and disconcerting depiction of love.

Ultimately, though, the plays that form "Silences and Salutations" work best when you think about them together. Stein's "What Happened" may come off as incomprehensible and unworthy of further consideration on its own, but when you start to think about what makes its particular brand of meaninglessness different from, say, the meaninglessness in "Play," the wheels start turning. Neither piece may ever make sense and you might hate both of them, but at least you'll have taken your brain out for a little jaunt.