The first half of Nicole Blaine’s one-woman memoir “Pipe Dreams” treads awfully familiar ground. In this strangely moving Fringe Festival import from Los Angeles, our plucky heroine makes a fool of herself at the junior prom, dates immature boys, and begs her lawyer mom to stop buying her off-brand sneakers – “pleather foot covers unworthy of being called a shoe” – and converting them into imitation Keds. (For the record, Ms. Blaine, who resembles Paige Davis with a cooler haircut, now wears what appear to be real Chuck Taylors. Purple ones.)

It’s engaging, if typical, coming-of-age stuff – until Ms. Blaine relates how she returned from her freshman year of college to find her mother smoking crack. Before long, Ms. Blaine’s bathrobe has found its way into her stepfather’s stash of pornography, and she’s trying to stop her mom from gouging clumps of her own skin with a pair of tweezers. As she washes the bloody tweezers in the bathroom sink, “standing there with pieces of my mother in my hand,” those fake Keds don’t seem so bad.

The lurch from domestic minidrama to family nightmare is incredibly – and intentionally – jarring. (It should be said that the “Pipe Dreams” poster is a Blaine family photo with a crack pipe superimposed into Mom’s hand, mitigating the surprise somewhat.) Things get creepier: Ms. Blaine’s mom, formerly the family disciplinarian, offers her daughter a turn on her pipe as a sort of bonding ritual. “What was this stuff?” asks an incredulous Ms. Blaine. “How could it be better than me?”

This blend of concern, bafflement, and narcissism runs through all of “Pipe Dreams,” which is written and directed by Ms. Blaine and her husband, Mickey. Act II is divided almost evenly between Ms. Blaine’s harrowing family experiences – she drops out of college and moves back home to protect her little brother – and her decision about whether to become a lawyer, a teacher, or an actress. The former material is as riveting as the latter is banal. (Here’s a hint about what she decided: She’s performing a one-woman show at the Fringe Festival.)

The sitcom “Friends” served as a rare oasis of laughter at the time, and near the end of “Pipe Dreams,” Ms. Blaine relates how she sought advice from the real-life Jennifer Aniston after bumping into her at a Rite-Aid. Ms. Aniston has perhaps been too influential a role model: Most of Ms. Blaine’s stories resolve themselves with the tidy satisfactions that sitcom writers love. But the central story defies any such resolution, and Ms. Blaine’s anguish at her mom’s state converges uncomfortably with her need to wrap up her play. Her final, shrugging acceptance of life’s innate messiness has clearly helped her as a daughter. With a little more discipline and perspective, it will also help this talented young survivor as a playwright.

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Busty gals who ride motorcycles, karate-chop bad guys, and give hallucinogens to minors – what’s not to like about “Go-Go Kitty, GO!”? Adobe Theatre Company veterans Erin Quinn Purcell and Greg Jackson have written a rock-’em-sock-’em tribute to 1960s soft-core auteur Russ Meyer, complete with blow darts, crooked cops, and gogo boots galore.

After the suspicious death of their stripper friend, two hard-boiled dames (Ms. Purcell and Kim Ders) find themselves “knockers-deep” in a sex scandal involving a politician with a dirty secret. As if Meyer’s rambunctiously pervy oeuvre wasn’t fruitful enough, Ms. Purcell and Mr. Jackson throw in a passel of other parodies (“All the President’s Men,” Arnold Schwarzenegger, “The Matrix”) without really connecting the conceptual dots. Still, a cool car chase or fight scene is never far away, all anchored by Mark Huang’s brilliant sound design.

The much-imitated Adobe troupe has taken this why-the-hell-not ethos in some smarter directions with works like “Orpheus & Eurydice,” and companies like Les Freres Cor busier have added a welcome bit of intellectual heft to the basic formula. But even if “Go-Go Kitty, GO!” represents a half step backward for the gang (since rechristened Theatre B), its grungy ingenuity does Meyer proud. “You’re all just a bunch of dirty girls with dirty pillows and dirty souls,” wails one bystander at our Go-Go Kitties. Yeah, but they know how to have fun.

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“Uncle Sam’s Satiric Spectacular,” a revue of mirthless, vaguely political vaudeville skits by the likes of Bridget Carpenter and Neo-Futurists cofounder Greg Allen, made me nostalgic for the acid partisan wit of Mark Russell. With the exception of a few charming old-timey tunes (a barbershop quartet kiss-off to the Geneva Conventions, a bouncy ode to getting an abortion “while I still can”) and an intriguing Eric Coble bit in which a contortionist tries to escape from his own life, the sketches range from the passable to the painful.

“Pipe Dreams” will be performed on August 23, 26 & 27 (279 Church Street, between White and Franklin Streets); “Go-Go Kitty, GO!” on August 24 & 27 (121 Christopher Street, between Bleecker and Hudson Streets); “Uncle Sam’s Satiric Spectacular” on August 23, 24 & 26 (115 MacDougal Street, between West 3rd and Bleecker Streets). Call 212-279-4488 for all Fringe Festival shows.