UPSTART Theatre initially planned to pick Joe Orton's What The Butler Saw for their third production, but that won't be seen until the autumn.

"We decided instead to broaden our brief to new plays, new talent, and to have some fun, so were fulfilling that brief with our Three Easy Pieces," says committee member Ian Giles, who is directing one of those "easy pieces", So That's The Way You Like It, alongside Sarah Cotterill's production of Womberang and Matt Simpson's staging of Lonesome Pine.

"Sarah is a new directing talent; Matt carries on his blossoming directorial career with a new play; and I'm filling the gap with a few larks with a few mates," Ian adds.

Upstart's triple bill of one-act pieces will run at Upstage Theatre, 41 Monkgate, York, from Tuesday to Saturday. The idea for the show came from actor, director and writer Mike Hickman, who will appear in Ian Giles's cast and co-wrote Lonesome Pine – a short play based around Laurel and Hardy's film antics and off-stage relationship – with Mark Wakeman.

"Mike had been in a group in Portsmouth that did a multi-piece format annually and we thought we should dip our toe in," says Matt.

"It's a format that works well in York, where so many people want to be involved in theatre," says Sarah. To prove her point, the three pieces will have 19 actors between them.

"There'll be that number again working backstage or in the production staff, and again we work from a core that's constantly being added to," says Ian.

Sarah is doing a doubling-up of a different kind: she is also the associate director of York company Theatre Mill's site-specific production of The Importance Of Being Earnest at the Mansion House this summer, as well as being in charge of Womberang. That role increased from last weekend, as she explains.

"The director, Samuel Wood, is assisting on Guys And Dolls in Chichester and he's gone off to do that now after the first two weeks of rehearsals, but we'd already set it in motion last week, where the cast did half an hour at each rehearsal with me, so it was almost like a support act."

Sarah has balanced her commitment to both shows, the Upstart production requiring a cast of nine for the late Sue Townsend's 1979 play in a gynaecology clinic, where Rita Onions causes havoc as she defies authority and spreads joyous anarchy among the patients.

"I'm doing 10am to 6pm with 'Earnest' and 7pm to 10pm with Womberang, but then after doing Blood + Chocolate on the York streets last year I can pretty much do anything," says Sarah.

"When we were looking to spread out the director's role for the summer show, it was an ideal opportunity to ask Sarah as I knew that she and the play Womberang would go together really well. It's very much a woman's play with seven out of nine roles being women in a play all about women's issues," says Ian, who used to run a writers' group in Leicester that Sue Townsend attended. He still had copies of the script.

"It's a 50-minute piece that's not well known that premiered as a lunchtime piece at the Soho Poly," says Sarah. "The setting is just hilarious, in a gynaecology clinic, and it's just a very naturally humorous play where the audience is with them in the waiting room, watching everything unfold."

Ian adds: "It's a piece of hyper-realism that the Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington said was the funniest thing he'd read in years."

Matt is building on directing York Shakespeare Project's Measure For Measure by presenting Lonesome Pine.

"Mike Hickman and Mark Wakeman are old friends from when Mike lived in Hampshire; I've not met Mark yet but have been fortunate to have had Mike on hand at rehearsals. To have the writer there is equal parts brilliant but terrifying."

Mike and Mark wrote Lonesome Pine as a radio play before converting it into a 40-minute stage piece.

"We're doing only the third or fourth performance, and the two actors we have playing Laurel and Hardy, Andrew Isherwood and William Spratt, are amazing" says Matt.

"They're looking the part, acting the part. It's quite melancholic with a bitter-sweet ending, but it's a really lovely piece about the relationship of Laurel and Hardy that looks at things people might not know about them."

Ian Giles is staging an eight-minute Shakespeare spoof, So That's The Way You Like It, from the pens of original performers Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore.

"It's as relevant and funny now as it was when it was written as part of their ground-breaking revue, Beyond The Fringe," says Ian who will play Cook's role alongside Mike Hickman's Miller, Paul Mason's Bennett and Joshua Burnell's Moore.

Upstart Theatre presents Three Easy Pieces, Upstage Theatre at 41 Monkgate, York, Tuesday to 5, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm Saturday matinee. Box office: 01904 632602 or at upstart.ticketsource.co.uk