The fifth annual Solo Performance Festival, Free the Radicals!, is ongoing at Theatre Off Jackson (through May 7; tickets), and as is usual, there’s a wide range of styles of solo performance to choose from. It’s a solo artist bazaar, and whatever your inclinations, you’re likely to find something you like there.

I went back for seconds of Matt Smith’s All My Children, getting another layer that I have to admit I missed the first time around (under Bret Fetzer’s direction, the veteran Smith puts you to straining for superlatives about all the small details).

Smith’s confessional monologue is couched as if you’ve sat down at a 12 Step meeting of some kind, and I suppose you could say that Terri Weagant’s is confessional, too, but Karaoke Suicide is Painless worries at your funny bone from a very different angle. Weagant plays a fed-up karaoke hostess at a waffle house, presenting a typology of the karaoke singers that cause her the most grief, from car-singing divas and showtune-obsessed drama geeks, to one-note melancholics and drunken packs of sorority sisters.

Weagant has a throaty alto (actually, what’s lower than alto?) and, here, the winning charisma of one of Hollywood’s brainy-but-nutty best friend of the lead. Her send-ups are hilarious not so much because they’re mocking, but because they’re so accurate, down to the a-musically shouted Lady GaGa song in the company of volunteers from the audience. Credit has to be given to writer (and, clearly, observational comic) Celene Ramadan and director David Gassner, who manages to interpolate video-to-human interaction without dragging things down at all. If Weagant’s arc bends sharply toward the end, that’s what you will get with a 50-minute show so devoted to entertaining you.

Striking a completely different dramatic note is Troy Mink’s MeNtAl, in which he chronicles his real-life experiences working with the mentally infirm and ill as a case aid. “Stutters, stammers & even jerks & tics have all occurred as a result of me being ‘naked’ or real in front of an audience,” writes Mink in his program note, explaining that this is the first time he’s played himself on stage. (He does give himself a multiple personality, though, in that a fundamentalist Christian aunt and schizophrenic uncle take over the narrative from time to time.) He’s directed by Matt Smith, whose touch is evident in the lack of dull moments or artifice in this “work in progress.”

After last night’s show, he said, “I survived it! I didn’t die,” when asked how he was feeling. He does survive the case aid experience–that’s what the show is about–but barely, at a cost to his own mental health. The stories–anecdotes about getting elders with dementia to take the medicine, or the client who claimed he was a bank robber–are delivered in everyday speech, which gives the impression that you’re listening to someone recount, unvarnished, a particularly grueling day.

If they are impressions more than narratives–the “bank robber” moves to a home, and chokes on a peanut butter sandwich–Mink’s evocations of his clients are marvels of physical and vocal likenesses. It’s like watching someone paint to life. His performance as an autistic client is the best I’ve ever seen, ever, in any medium.

So a client dies, or vanishes. It’s sad, but these things happen. Your life has to go on, in mental health, you have ever more clients–which is what Mink has to face, and is warped by. When he decides to walk away from it all while he still can, you can approve of his wisdom while dying a little yourself as you think of the needs unmet.