One-Act Plays Festivals

by Kirk Woodward

[Now comes my friend Kirk Woodward with a new contribution to the blog he urged me to start, lo these 7½ years ago.  This time, returning the broad topic of theater, Kirk’s looking at one-act plays and one-act festivals.  I know you’ll find several truths in his thesis and possibly some thoughts that had never occurred to you before.  As a playwright himself, Kirk has had years of experience writing—and submitting—short plays and in “One-Act Plays Festivals,” he shares some of what he’s learned from that experience as well as that of a long-time theatergoer and sometime theater reviewer.]

There’s a remarkable current theatrical phenomenon that I haven’t seen much published comment about – namely, the one-act play festival or competition.

One-act plays have a long theatrical history, as curtain-raisers, as short stand-alone entertainments, and as major dramatic works in their own right. Moliere (1622-1673) gained his early fame writing one act comedies like “The Flying Doctor” and “The Rehearsal at Versailles” that followed the tragedies he and others wrote. In the late Nineteenth Century, when full-length plays formed part of longer evenings’ entertainment, important writers like George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), and Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934) wrote short plays to precede the main events.

Much of the early growth of American theater in the first half of the Twentieth Century can be found in the one-act plays that Eugene O’Neill, in particular, wrote for the Washington Square Players (1914-1918) and the Provincetown Players (1915-1929), with his “sea plays” generally regarded as among his best, and as outstanding examples of the form. The professional career of Tennessee Williams began when a collection of one-act plays he submitted to a Group Theatre competition was awarded a special cash prize.

So one-act plays are an enduring presence in theater. However, the classic one-acts are old news. The words “World Premiere,” “Original Work,” and “New Plays” are assumed to have strong appeal, and the one-act play festivals and competitions I’m talking about almost all feature new work. At a minimum, they will not feature a play by, say, Eugene O’Neill.

The idea of the one-act play festival or competition got a major push when the Actors Theatre of Louisville (ATL) began its National Ten-Minute Play Contest in 1989. This gives me a certain sense of pride because I’m from Louisville, and because I was present at the first organizational meeting of that theater, in 1964.

ATL did not invent the one-act play festival or competition, any more than it invented the one-act play. Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) in New York, for example, began a notable one-act play festival in 1986, three years before ATL, which continues to this day. However, EST accepts submissions up to forty pages long. (Generally speaking, a page of a script is assumed to equal a minute of stage time.)

The genius of ATL was to impose a limit in the length of one act plays to ten minutes. (Their specific requirement is for no more than ten pages of script, not counting the title page and notes.) I have not been able to determine whether the ten-minute limit was ATL’s invention – I’d guess it was not – but they also popularized it by publishing a series of collections of the one-act plays they’ve produced. These collections have wide popularity in the theater community.

With a ten minute play limit, a full evening of one-acts can contain eleven or twelve plays without much difficulty. (ATL has experimented with even shorter time lengths of submissions in recent years, including plays to be performed as phone conversations, and plays printed on T-shirts.)

In any case, the one-act play festival phenomenon has now reached astounding proportions. A Google search for “one-act play collections” reports about 9,730,000 results. About!

                                                                                                             

One of the first listings on a recent search was titled “One Act Plays For Every Stage – Read 2,100 One Act Plays Free.” That’s a lot of one-act plays on just one website. My brain can’t hold the idea of 2,100 one-act plays existing, much less the idea of reading all of them. I don’t know if I could read 2,100 of anything. And that was among the first search item that turned up.

A web search for “one-act play competitions” turns up a couple of million fewer hits. Among the notable long-lasting festivals in Manhattan are those of the Manhattan Repertory Theatre, the Strawberry One-Act Festival, and, as noted, Ensemble Studio Theatre’s series.

In a way the term “one-act play” is something of a misnomer. It might equally well be applied to full-length plays (one or one-and-a-half to two hours long or longer) performed without an intermission, like 2016’s The Humans. Shakespeare’s plays appear to have been originally performed this way, with no breaks in the action at all. (The first division of his plays into acts was by Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718) in his edition of the plays published in 1709. He created the scene divisions in the plays too.)

I admit that I have no name to substitute for the kind of play I’m talking about here. “Short one-act play” is about as close as I can come, and it is implied in this article. Very often these plays are original – that is, they’ve never been produced before. Producers love to announce premieres. Clearly this policy wastes good plays – why shouldn’t they be produced more than once? But the label “new work” has some drawing power.

There are many reasons that short one-act play festivals and competitions are currently popular, reasons that apply to producers, to actors, potentially to audiences, and definitely to playwrights as well. There are downsides too, which I will mention.

For producers, one-act play festivals and competitions offer a conceivably enticing financial prospect. If a producer puts on a program of, say, seven one-act plays, each with an average cast of three, and if each of those people, plus the writer, brings in six family members, there is already a practically guaranteed audience of 168 people, and the producer hasn’t even printed a flier yet. (I have been in more than one production of a full length play that didn’t bring in that many people over an entire run.)

Of course success still may not be guaranteed, even in a theater with a small seating capacity. But there is another possible strategic move. Call your night (or nights, or weeks, or festivals) of one-act plays a competition, offer a cash prize of a reasonable amount, and make it clear that winning the competition will depend on audience voting.

Writers in particular will pack the house with “safe” voters. More audience! If you have a smallish sized theater, you may even sell out. Meanwhile your production costs are likely to be low, since multiple set changes between plays require that items like furniture be kept to a minimum.

So presenting a festival or competition of one-act plays is a sensible financial strategy, even if the words “An Evening of One-Acts” on the marquee is by itself no guarantee of success. (It may be, of course. The one-act play competition at Actors Theatre of Louisville, for example, is extremely popular on its own. However, that theater has worked hard to build a reputation as a quality production house.)

For actors, the advantage is a significant increase in the number of available roles. True, a big role in a one-act play probably won’t be the size of a big role in a full length play. On the other hand, it could be a meatier role. In any case, it’s work. Often one-act plays are rehearsed on independent schedules, one for each play, with the whole group brought together only at the last minute. This too is an advantage for actors, who need to schedule their time efficiently.

The advantage of one-act play festivals and competitions to audiences is more problematic. As I said, the festivals at Actors Theatre of Louisville are popular, but the quality of work at that theater is high, which is not the case of the material at every one-act play festival, even in Manhattan. The odds are against any new play’s succeeding; the odds of a dozen of them succeeding at once are low.

Of course, the risks involved in one-act plays are also smaller. Some, actually, are no more than skits, which I’d define as actors in short depictions of situations that require only surface characterization. Good skits aren’t easier to write than anything else, but at least they are compact, often funny, and quickly understood.

Generally, however, I doubt that much of the general play-going public is thinking right now, “I wish I could find a good evening of one-act plays.” I was once in a rock band where, after a particularly successful string of numbers, the lead singer announced, “Now we’re going to do some original material.” The crowd fell ominously silent and he had to add that he was joking. I’m not sure that the term “one-act play festival” doesn’t have something of the same effect.

However, as noted above, many of us will go to a play for the purpose of supporting a friend or relative who’s in it or wrote it, and an evening of one-act plays offers an opportunity to include a lot of those.

One-act play festivals and competitions are also attractive to playwrights. This is in fact an element in the popularity of one-act plays for both producers and playwrights. Producers need plays to present, and playwrights write them. Producers love one-act plays because all they have to do is ask for them, and the plays come pouring in, because the playwright has a chance of getting a play produced.

What a wonder this is for a playwright, who lives a life of continual rejection. Of course there’s no guarantee a particular one-act play will be accepted for production. I have written, for example, a ten-minute play on a Christmas subject that I think is both offbeat and funny, and that has never gotten the slightest glimmer of interest from any festival of holiday plays (a sub-genre of the one-act play festival).

But the odds of having a play accepted by a one-act play festival or competition are at least greatly increased, because not only might one performance present between half a dozen and a dozen plays, but the festival might include dozens more presented on different nights, perhaps in a different order for each performance.

Also, because the producing organization actually wants to receive submissions of plays, instead of dreading to receive them (as is often the case), a playwright can have reasonable confidence that her play will really be read by somebody. (People who have not submitted plays to theaters and agents can’t begin to imagine how often plays are lost, ignored, or cursorily read.)

And it simply takes less time to write a short one-act play – say, a play ten minutes long – than it does to write a full-length play. If I have a good idea, I can write a good one-act play overnight. The demand for “original work” can easily be met.

But what if I don’t have a good idea? Shorter is not necessarily easier. In fact, shorter is much more difficult. If it weren’t, there’d be – I was going to say hundreds, but considering the Google search, I should probably say millions – of good or great one-act plays around. There aren’t.

The sentence, “I’m sorry I wrote such a long letter, but I didn’t have time to write a short one,” has been attributed to many people. Whoever said it, its point is correct. It’s easy to be verbose and extraordinarily hard to be succinct.

The solution, for many one-act plays I’ve seen, is to choose a subject with impact, use that as the subject of the one-act, and rely for success on the seriousness of the issue raised – say, because I’ve seen so many of these plays, cancer. Cancer is real, it’s terrible, it’s disastrous, it’s horrible. No question.

So write a play about someone with cancer. They die – tears. Or they live – cheers! Or they struggle – drama!

What can possibly be wrong with that? I have two answers, one more or less practical and one aesthetic. The practical objection is that what you’re doing in such a play is emotional manipulation. You’re taking a subject you know will succeed in stirring an audience’s feelings, and putting it up there in the knowledge that it’s precertified as intense, stirring drama.

Emotional manipulation is difficult to avoid, but we ought to try. It’s just too easy. Shakespeare figured that out a long time ago, and he does very little emotional manipulation. He has Hamlet say:

Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann'd,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? 

I understand that cancer, or any other strenuous or catastrophic event, may not be “nothing” to the writer – it may in fact be real and personal. But as artists we have responsibilities to our art, and one of them, I submit, is to cheat as little as possible, and to approach subjects creatively and imaginatively, rather than using them for their predetermined value in tears and fears.

Far too often, one-act plays take a huge problem, throw it at us knowing we already have feelings about it, and leave it at that. Easy to do – one-act plays aren’t very long. Suppose a play competition’s subject is “Dogs.” Then have a play where a child’s dog is run over. Why not? It happens in life, doesn’t it? It’s terrible, isn’t it? But it’s also emotional manipulation.

And as I said, there’s also an aesthetic reason why such an approach is dubious. Aristotle in the Poetics says that tragedy – and I think this can be applied to other forms of drama as well – works when it is an “imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude.”

Although there’s plenty of argument about exactly what he means, I think it’s clear that he feels a play’s size should be proportional to its subject.

Few of us today would want to turn Aristotle’s observations (assuming they are his – some suspect the Poetics is lecture notes) into rules, as happened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

But the man has a point. A one-act play needs a one-act action – an action that fits the size of the play. A study of the best one-act plays points this out.

In a series of postings elsewhere on this blog, I describe several excellent examples of the genre by George Bernard Shaw, for example “The Glimpse of Reality” and “The Six of Calais.” [See the author’s series “Re-Reading Shaw,” 3 and 18 July, 8 and 23 August, and 2 September.] In both these plays Shaw does everything required by the size of his story – not less, and not more.

Contrast Shaw’s examples with a number of the one-act plays I’ve seen recently, whose subjects have included, among others, old age and dementia; cancer – there it is again;  severe mental illness; suicide; having to put animals to sleep; and my very least (but frequent) favorite, the Deceased Wife Play. Sometimes two or more of these are combined in one ten-minute episode. I suggest a firm rule: No more than one death per one-act play!

Such works make one-act plays on subjects like dating rituals seem like masterpieces. Perhaps that’s why there are so many one-act plays about dating rituals.

A friend remarked to me that many of these plays – both the tragic and the “relationship” one-acts – are “window” plays:  you look at them and you see a bit of life, as though you saw it through a window, not much changed from the way it happens in the world. My two responses are that looking through a window is not the purpose of art, and that if those things are what the window reveals, I don’t want to live in that neighborhood.

In saying all this I am also grateful for the many delightful one-act plays I’ve seen. They exist and I salute the people who write them. As a favorite example I cite “Words, Words, Words” by David Ives (1987). A riff on the idea that a million monkeys on a million typewriters will eventually write the plays of Shakespeare, it shows three monkeys (named Milton, Swift, and Kafka) banging away on the keys, comparing and criticizing their work, briefly coming close to an actual Shakespeare line, and illustrating in a charming way the difficulties of writing and the frustrations of creative work. It’s a play with both immediate and long-range implications, snugly embodied in the short play form. May its tribe increase.

Unquestionably, no one has the right to tell an artist what to create. Playwrights must write the plays that come to them. But I would love to be able to look at a sign that reads “AN EVENING OF ONE-ACT PLAYS” with anticipation rather than dread. Could evenings of one-act plays be more like festivals, and less like autopsies? May I suggest that as a goal?

[Over the time I’ve been posting play reports on ROT, I’ve included a number of one-act play evenings.  Some are not really very short plays, the way Kirk means, and several fit into the negative characterizations Kirk describes.

·   Horton Foote’s nine-play trilogy, The Orphans’ Home Cycle (reported on 25 and 28 February 2010), is an assemblage of one-act plays all telling the fictionalized story of Foote’s father’s life. 

·   Five By Tenn was a bill of one-acts by Tennessee Williams, first staged as the opening show of “Tennessee Williams Explored” (April-July 2004), the season-long celebration by Washington’s Kennedy Center of the great playwright; I posted my review of the evening, “Uninhabitable Country: Five By Tenn,” on 5 March 2011.        

·   Happy Hour, a world première staged by the Atlantic Theater Company, is a collection of three one-acts by Ethan Coen; I reported on the trilogy of bleak glimpses at human behavior with an ironic title on 29 December 2011. 

·   Early Plays, an adaptation of three one-acts from the Glencairn Plays by Eugene O’Neill, was presented at St. Ann’s Warehouse by the Wooster Group and the New York City Players.  My report was posted on 14 March 2013.

·   3 Kinds of Exile, a collection of three one-acts by John Guare connected by a common theme, was presented by the Atlantic Theater Company in June 2013.  I posted my report on 27 June 2013.

·   Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy is comprised of three connected one-acts, International Stud, Fugue in a Nursery, and Widows and Children First!, which premièred separately.  I saw the joint production at the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., in 2013 and posted my report on 5 October.

·   Lee Blessing’s Flag Day is a pair of one-acts, Black Sheep and Perilous Night, also originally presented individually, that I saw at the Contemporary American Theatre Festival in Sheperdstown, West Virginia, in 2004; I posted my report, “Contemporary American Theatre Festival (2004),” on 8 July 2014.

·   Summer Shorts is an annual two-part festival of one-act plays, often including work by well-known authors, presented in July and August by 59E59 Theatres.  I saw one evening of the festival in 2015 and published “Summer Shorts 2015, Series A,” on 12 August.

·   Desire is another collection of one-acts by Tennessee Williams, but these six plays are all adaptations of short stories, scripted by different playwrights.  It was a production of the Acting Company, which has made something of an industry of assembling this sort of evening (Chekhov stories, Shakespeare sonnets), in 2015 and my report appeared on 29 September.

·   Last May, I caught a presentation of three Samuel Beckett one-acts, Not I, Footfalls, and Rockaby, performed in a bravura production by Irish actress Lisa Dwan called “Beckett Trilogy.”  I posted my report on this experience on 1 May 2016.

·   In June, the Signature Theatre Company presented an evening of one-acts drawn from past seasons devoted to three playwrights: Edward Albee’s The Sandbox, María Irene Fornés’s Drowning, and Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro.  I posted a report called “Signature Plays” on 3 June 2016.

·   My most recent one-act evening was Horton Foote’s The Roads to Home, produced by Primary Stages at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village.  The three connected one-acts, A Nightingale, The Dearest of Friends, Spring Dance, is running though 27 November and my report was posted on 22 October. 

[Some of these playlets were composed to be performed together, so they’re not necessarily the kind of bill of one-acts that Kirk is writing about, but the list does give some idea of the popularity of the short play on today’s theater.]

'Desire'

Back in 1986, the Acting Company commissioned seven diverse playwrights to compose adaptations of short stories by Anton Chekhov.  Produced at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in April and May that year, some of the seven plays in Orchards hoved closely to their sources, others took a more liberal perspective, and one or two ignored their Chekhovian origin entirely.  (In 1997/98, the Acting Company used the same strategy—commissioning a diverse team of eminent playwrights—to create an evening of plays and music inspired by Shakespeare’s sonnets entitled Love’s Fire.)  Well, now the same company has turned to Tennessee Williams (1911-83), another great playwright and short story-writer, in the same vein.  Presented as the second entry in the 2015-16 5A Season at the 59E59 Theaters, Desire comprises six short plays adapted by six very different authors from Williams stories published between 1939 and 1980.

59E59’s 5A Season, its mainstage presentation, encompasses five full productions in Theater A (hence the name) on the first floor of the East 59th Street home.  Desire, which runs from 2 September to 10 October and opened to the press on 10 September, is considered a world première even though it was workshopped over four days in July at Vassar College’s Powerhouse Theater in Poughkeepsie, New York, home of New York Stage and Film.  Diana, my frequent theater companion—this show was actually her idea, and it turned out to be a mighty good one—saw the 8 p.m. performance on Friday, 18 September.  (My report on “Summer Shorts 2015, Series A,” posted on 12 August, includes a brief background on the 59E59 Theaters.)

Founded in 1972 by producer/director/actor John Houseman, who was the first director of Juilliard’s Drama Division (founded in 1968), and Margot Harley with members of the program’s first graduating class, the Acting Company promotes theater by touring across the U.S. with a repertory of classics and new works performed by young actors and teaching artists.  It concentrates on communities where live performance and theater arts education are limited.  The company has now expanded beyond Juilliard graduates, auditioning actors from all over the country.  Each year, the Acting Company performs in over 40 cities to 70,000 theatergoers and provides arts education to more than 30,000 students.  According to its own website, the company has presented 141 productions of classic, contemporary, and new plays to over three million spectators in 48 states and ten foreign countries. 

The Acting Company has received critical acclaim nationally.  In 2003, it was awarded a TONY for Excellence in Theater and the company has won many other awards such as Obies, AUDELCOS (to honor excellence in New York African American Theatre) and the Los Angeles Critics Circle Award.  The company has a record of fostering new works for the stage based on classic literature long before Desire, including Love’s Fire; The Robber Bridegroom by Alfred Uhry (1975, based on a 1942 novel by Eurdora Welty); Orchards; and Rebecca Gilman’s 2005 adaptation of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) by Carson McCullers (coincidentally, a close friend of Tennessee Williams).  Some of the illustrious alumni of  the Acting Company include Dennis Boutsikaris, Frances Conroy, Keith David, Dann Florek, Harriet Harris, Kevin Kline, Hamish Linklater, Patti LuPone, Jesse L. Martin, Randle Mell, Andrew Prosky, David Schramm, David Ogden Stiers, Lorraine Toussaint, Rainn Wilson, and Jeffrey Wright. 

(Acting Company alums Megan Bartle, Liv Rooth, John Skelley, Derek Smith, and Yaegel T. Welch appear in Desire.  A side note about Smith: his was the only cast name I recognized before reading the program; I’d seen Juliet Brett and Yaegel T. Welch  as Bonnie in A. R. Gurney’s What I Did Last Summer and Jonathan in Athol Fugard’s The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek, respectively—see my reports on 28 June and 3 July—but I didn’t know that until I read their bios.  As it happens, I saw Smith, who’s now 55, as Romeo at Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre in 1986, former Acting Company director Michael Kahn’s first production as artistic director of STC.)

Subtitled An Evening of Plays Based on Six Stories by Tennessee Williams, Desire has a repertory cast of nine directed by Michael Wilson (Horton Foote’s The Orphans Home Cycle at the Signature Theatre Company, 2009-10—see my report on 25 and 28 February 2010; Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful on Broadway with Cecily Tyson, 2013) on a unit set.  The scenic and projection design is by Jeff Cowie, the costume design by David C. Woolard, the lighting design by Russell H. Champa, and the original music and sound design by John Gromada.  The show runs two-and-a-half hours with one intermission between the third and fourth plays.  Many of Williams’s stories eventually became the bases of several of his full-length plays, including some of his best-known works: “The Yellow Bird” (published in 1967) became Summer and Smoke (1948) and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1964); “One Arm” (1967), Camino Real (1953); “Three Players of a Summer Game” (1960), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955); “The Night of the Iguana” (1967), the play of the same title (1961); and “Man Bring This Up Road” (1994), The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963).  In Desire, John Guare’s You Lied To Me About Centralia was adapted from “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” (1948), which Williams used as the foundation of The Glass Menagerie (1944), his first commercial success.  (Short story publication dates are often later than Williams’s composition of the piece.  Some stories had been unpublished, others appeared in magazines before being collected into book anthologies.)

The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin (short story published in 1951) by Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart, 1978, Pulitzer Prize; The Miss Firecracker Contest, 1979) is the evening’s most clearly autobiographical tale and Henley kept to the original storyline and setting.  (Williams was well-known for recycling his biography in his writing.  When this story appeared in print, Williams’s father told his son’s agent, “Tell Tom to keep my family out of his stories.”)  It takes place in the 1920s in a small Mississippi town, (probably the Delta town of Clarksdale, where Williams; his older sister, Rose; and their mother, Miss Edwina, lived in that era with Williams’s grandfather, the Rev. Walter Dakin, and grandmother, Rosina (Rose) Otte Dakin, who was called Grand).  I’d bet the incidents recounted in Resemblance were actual events in the Williams family when the nascent writer was a child.  (In fact, Lyle Leverich describes similar incidents in his 1995 biography, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams.)  Tom (Mickey Theis), obviously named for Thomas Lanier Williams III, the writer’s birth name, and his older sister and only real friend, Roe (Juliet Brett), recalling Williams’s own beloved sister, are also playmates, making up all kinds of esoteric games like the Stations of the Cross.  But Roe is preoccupied with her piano lessons with Miss Alley (Kristen Adele) and the recital her teacher has organized for her and this irks Tom.  (Piano and additional music for Resemblance are by Jana Mainelli.)  Miss Alley has also arranged for young, handsome Richard Miles (Brian Cross), her prize pupil who’s come back for a visit, to partner with Roe on the violin.  This annoys Tom, but it also unnerves Roe, for the young girl is growing up and Tom feels she’s leaving him behind.  During one of their games, Roe screams and Tom sees that there’s blood running down her leg—though he doesn’t understand what it means—and Roe runs off in fright, ordering her little brother not to follow her.  At the same time, Roe is beginning to act erratically and finds she’s no longer able to play her music, developments that confound her mother (Megan Bartle) and grandmother (Liv Rooth).  (The play doesn’t specify, but theatergoers familiar with Williams’s history will know that Rose suffered from schizophrenia starting in her teens, ultimately being institutionalized for the rest of her life after a lobotomy in 1943—eight years before Williams published the story.)  The title comes from Tom’s perception of Richard’s ubiquitous violin case, which Roe always asks to carry to rehearsal for him.  Tom says that the case looks like a coffin . . . for a baby or a doll.  It’s an eerie note to an already bittersweet story.

Tent Worms (1980) by Elizabeth Egloff (The Swan, 1990; and Peter Pan and Wendy, 1997; Ether Dome, 2011) is set in the present (updated from Williams’s original, written in 1945) on the deck of a house on Cape Cod, Massachusetts (where Williams spent a lot of time over the years, including the summer of 1946 when he shared a cottage on Nantucket Island, south of the Cape in Nantucket Sound, with Carson McCullers while she dramatized her novel The Member of the Wedding and he worked on Summer and Smoke).  Billy (Derek Smith) and his wife, Clara (Rooth), are spending the summer away from the turmoil of the city at their vacation cottage.  Billy is a writer and he usually uses the freedom to work out on the deck while Clara relaxes.  (They’ve never made friends of any of their neighbors.)  The marriage now seems strained and Billy has become preoccupied with ridding the property of the tent worms that have been building their webs in the cottage’s trees.  When the play starts, Billy’s up in one of the trees with a leaf-blower, making a racket while trying to wipe out the parasites.   He’s nearly—well, not really “nearly”—obsessed with this, and Clara has taken up drinking as a defense.  Clearly, there’s something more going on, and a phone call from Billy’s doctor provides some answers.  We only hear Clara’s frantic side of the conversation (in the story, Williams lets us in on both sides), but it indicates that Billy’s sick and probably dying—though we don’t learn from what.  Clara doesn’t think her husband knows, but it’s evident he does, which may account for all his behavioral aberrations.  The couple, however, don’t ever talk about this—or much of anything else.  Things are obviously getting direr and in a last act of desperation, Billy decides to burn the creatures out, torching the tree and the deck, terrifying Clara until the firefighters arrive and put the smoky blaze out.  This act leaves Clara distraught, but Billy is unperturbed.  (Egloff has moved the action up to 2015, and Clara’s phone call is on a cell—but Billy apparently writes on an old-fashioned manual typewriter, not a laptop or even an electric machine.  A reference to Tennessee Williams sitting on a similar deck back in the ‘40s?  It’s a curiosity.)

You Lied To Me About Centralia by John Guare (The House of Blue Leaves, 1971 and 1986, 1986 Tony nominee; Landscape of the Body; and Six Degrees of Separation, 1990, 1991 Tony and Pulitzer nominee, Atlantic City, screenplay 1982, Oscar nominee) is the story of Jim, Laura’s gentleman caller from Glass Menagerie, after leaving the Wingfield apartment after dinner that night.  Guare doesn’t say anything about this (though the original story gives much the same account as Menagerie), so you have to know Menagerie to recognize the narrative Jim (Theis) tells his fiancée, Betty (Bartle), when they meet in the waiting room of St. Louis’s Union Station.  Set in 1937, You Lied recounts Jim’s meeting with Betty after her return from a train trip to her rich uncle.  She’d told him she was going to Centralia, Missouri, so Jim wouldn’t know that she was going to ask her uncle for money to make a down payment on a house she wants.  Jim had even waited for Betty at the wrong platform because of her fib.  She says she’s hungry, but he tells her he’s already eaten, and related his evening at the home of Tom, his co-worker at the shoe factory where they both work.  Betty’s instantly alarmed.  Tom’s something of an outcast and Jim and the other workers call him “Nancy-Boy” for his effeminate ways after they discovered he writes poetry on the tops of the shoe boxes.  (Both of these details are facts of Williams’s time as a young man when he took a job in the shoe factory where his father was a travelling salesman.  The aspiring poet did write poems on the box tops and C. C. Williams called his son “Miss Nancy.”)  But Jim regrets his cruelty once he’s gotten to know Tom, and he enjoyed the evening at Tom’s home, even dancing with his slightly peculiar sister, Laura.  Betty’s immediately jealous.  What does this mean?  Is Jim in love with this Laura?  Of course, Jim had told his hosts that he was engaged to be married in a few weeks, and they said goodbye to him in disappointment, but Jim seems to have picked up on something he doesn’t quite understand yet, and I wondered if a marriage to conventional and self-centered Betty would really work out.  (She hadn’t gotten the money from her rich uncle.  He’d already gotten them a wedding gift.)

                            

Desire Quenched by Touch (“Desire and the Black Masseur,” 1948) by Marcus Gardley (PEN/Laura Pels Award-winner; . . . And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi, 2010; Every Tongue Confess, 2010; and The Box: A Black Comedy, 2014), set in the massage room of a public bathhouse and the office of police Detective Bacon in New Orleans in 1952, is disturbing in a different way from Resemblance and it has an especially gruesome ending.  (I won’t reveal the ending, but I will note that Leverich reports in Tom that the young Williams was fascinated with Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.)  Yaegel T. Welch is Grand, an African-American masseur at a public bathhouse in New Orleans who’s being questioned by Smith’s Bacon, an NOPD detective, over the mysterious disappearance of Grand’s most frequent—and eccentric—client, John Skelley’s Burns.  As Bacon interviews Grand—it’s not hostile at first, although the detective believes the masseur is involved in Burns’s vanishing—we see flashbacks of Grand’s increasingly sadomasochistic massages as Burns begs for ever more punishing treatment until the masseur performs an act so shocking it doesn’t seem to suit the play Gardley wrote.  (In Williams’s original story, which he saw as a tale of atonement, Grand is more in tune with the violence and the story is more forthcoming about the pleasure a black man takes in abusing a white man in the era of Jim Crow.) 

Oriflamme (1974; retitled from “The Red Part of a Flag,” 1944) by David Grimm (Measure for Pleasure, 2006; The Miracle at Naples, 2009;  and Tales from Red Vienna, 2014) takes place on a hill in a park in St. Louis on a summer afternoon in 1939 where Anna (Rooth) has fled to escape her stultifying life and encounters Rodney (Smith in an entirely different performance from his others here).  (Hilton Als, in his New Yorker profile of Williams, asserts that Anna is a homage to Grand, the playwright’s maternal grandmother, who died in 1944, for her “anarchic spirit.”   I said Williams reused his bio for his writing.)  Anna, who could be a reflection of Blanche Du Bois from Streetcar or Alma Winemiller from Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities, has been feeling confined by her life, especially her job at the local department store, so one afternoon she decides to buy herself a scarlet silk evening dress—and then, to the shock of the store’s staff, insists on wearing it out even though it’s “a dress for the evening.”  The dress gives her not only a sense of freedom and sensuous delight, but frees her inner naughty girl, a trait she has repressed since childhood.  Anna finds herself in the park, at the top of a hill, where she finds Rodney, known as Hooch because of the flask he always carries in his pocket.  (The character of Rodney was invented by Grimm.)  He’s sitting on the top of the back of a wooden bench, his feet on the seat, reading a racing form.  Rodney, as Anna prefers to call him at first, is a vulgar, rough working man (a portrait, not so much of a prototype of Stanley Kowalski, but Cornelius Coffin Williams, the writer’s abusive father) and he spots confused and conflicted Anna in her slinky, provocative red dress, as a potential conquest.  He plies her with booze and insidiously chats her up.  She recounts many incidents from her past and her regrets and wishes, until Rodney moves in for the clinch.  She reacts with instant fear and anger at Rodney’s presumption of intimacy and Rodney leaves in a frustrated huff.  As he departs, Anna gives a little cough into her hand, revealing a large spot of blood, and we see that she’s probably quite sick.  (In the story, Williams reveals Anna’s fatal condition early, but in the play it’s not foreshadowed.  In fact, the story makes clear that Anna will die before the day’s out, but Grimm leaves her fate uncertain.) 

The Field of Blue Children (1939; originally written in 1928, when Williams was still a teenager) by Rebecca Gilman (Pulitzer and Olivier Awards nominee; Spinning into Butter, 2000; Boy Gets Girl, 2000; and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, 2005) updates the writer’s story to today and makes it a comedy of sexual awakening and suppressed desires from Williams original contemplative tale of a conformist college sorority sister who secretly yearns for more.  Set on and around the campus of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Layley (Bartle) is taking a poetry class to learn how to say things she thinks in better, more expressive ways.  She’s inarticulate (though not actually stupid, as hinted by her own joke about her sorority, “Tri Delt”:  “They’re so stupid that they only knew one Greek letter.  So they repeated it three times: Delta Delta Delta”) so all she can say to the class’s best poet, Dylan (Skelley), is that she likes his poems.  But she’s attracted to more than Dylan’s poetry and she meets him at a coffee house for a poetry reading, foregoing the popular kids’ big after-game party for the homecoming football game with Ole Miss, ’Bama’s traditional rival.  Walking though the park after the reading, she and Dylan have a sexual encounter, invited by Layley, which is played hilariously for all its serious implications.  (Okay.  After removing Layley’s panties at her suggestion, Dylan puts his head up under her dress and Layley goes off increasingly loudly, like Meg Ryan’s Sally in the famous delicatessen scene in When Harry Met Sally . . . .)  But both Dylan and Layley have significant others, his a somewhat militant and aggressively intellectual black student named Meaghan (Adele) and hers the conventional “perfect” upper-crust frat boy, Grant (Cross), but neither Dylan nor Layley are happy with their partners.  (Grant is as emptyheaded as the sorority girls, the kind of guy, if this weren’t set in 2015, you’d expect to come bounding into the house, asking, “Tennis, anyone?”  And Meaghan is as narrow-minded and dismissive in her way as the puffballs of fraternity and sorority row are assumed to be.)  Layley’s sorority sisters, Cee Cee (Brett) and Curry (Rooth), are as bubbleheaded, vacuous, and judgmental as their stereotypes are expected to be—but in ways silly enough to be funny more than mean.  Both Dylan and, especially, Layley ultimately feel compelled to stay within their social and self-defined bounds and after Layley delivers an unintended surprise, the two students who might have made a great pair if they broke their self-constructed bonds walk away from one another into the predictable future that Layley, in particular, has already laid out for us.  

I liked the physical production very much.  The basic set for Desire, designed by Jeff Cowie, is the same through the whole evening, with a few set pieces added to set the scenes for each play (or each location for the few multi-scene plays).  The main piece of scenery is an abstract tree on stage right, really an assemblage of yellow-ish painted boards forming a trunk and branches at the top, disappearing into the fly space.  Tom and Roe in Resemblance sit in it and pose in the branches and Billy is hidden among its branches with his leaf-blower when Tent Worms opens.  Up stage, across the back of the set, is a wooden wall made of weathered gray boards (very reminiscent of traditional structures on Cape Cod and the islands), but the boards are put together in varying patterns rather than parallel straight across the wall: there are patches that look like boarded-up windows and vertical strips as well as horizontal ones.  It’s not representative, except that it’s a wooden wall.  Is it the side of a barn?  A garage?  A neighboring house?  A shack?  We don’t really know. 

The wall, however, also serves as a projection screen, when Cowie’s slides and videos sometimes obliterate the wood texture, sometimes superimpose another image over the wood texture.  One of the most marvelous projections comes in Resemblance when Richard Miles rides in on his bicycle.  First of all, director Michael Wilson eschews an actual bike, using two actors to carry in bicycle wheels, one in front of Brian Cross and one behind, while Miles paces along in a meandering course across the stage.  (Sara Swanberg designed the show’s props.)  It’s an extremely delightful and expressive image, made more dramatic by the multiple projections of bike wheels on the back wall, floating around like giant ping pong balls in slow motion.  It’s a joyful and dreamlike picture and makes clear why Roe, in her world of circumscribed behavior, is so intrigued with the handsome Richard.  Other projections were less dynamic than the bicycle but no less expressive and revealing.  The black-and-white photographic representation of the railroad station interior in You Lied, for instance, reminiscent of old Penn Station in New York City, was better than most CGI effects I’ve seen in movies—more evocative and pointed, it’s both old (because it’s black and white and a period image) and real (because it’s a photo, not a drawing or painting) at the same time.

Davis C. Woolard’s costumes not only vividly set the time for each play, but the mood and personality of each character.  That scarlet silk gown Anna wears in Oriflamme is a perfect example—it tells Anna’s whole story in a visual.  (It doesn’t hurt that Liv Rooth uses it as a prop much the way a Restoration character might use a fan or a handkerchief.  It speaks its own dialogue.)  All the visual aspects of the production were brought to life and energized by the lighting of Russel H. Champa (with an assist from the cast, of course).  In fact, I have to add here that one of the greatest pleasures of this production was that it was a true and pervasive ensemble, stretching not only to all the members of the cast, which is usually what defines an ensemble production, and, of course, to the director, but to each of the designers who created elements of the show.  (I don’t know if the writers continued to participate in the creation of this production once rehearsals started, but if they did, they had to be part of this collaboration.)  Everything fit too well for it to have been accidental or good luck, even if Wilson were a theatrical genius.  Desire is an example of what can happen when artists of every field work together with one another to create a performance.  (If I’m wrong on this, if the Acting Company’s Desire was merely the result of a happy accident, I’d just as soon not hear about it.  Leave me in my benighted ignorance.  I’m happy here.)

Michael Wilson’s direction is both solid and sure-handed, as well as appropriate for the circumstances of each playlet.  (He’s had some experience with Tennessee Williams material: The Red Devil Battery Sign, world première in 1996, and the 2011 revival of The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore.  In 1999, as artistic director of Connecticut’s Hartford Stage, Wilson launched a 10-year marathon of Williams’s works, including the premières in 2003 of Now the Cats with Jeweled Claws, The Palooka, and The One Exception.)  First, his choice of cast, all nine members of the ensemble, and of the design concept (with Cowie, Woolard, Champa, and Gromada) are both excellent, well-tailored to each of the stories and their varied circumstances.  (I don’t know if Wilson had a say in the selection of the six playwrights who made the adaptations, but if he did, obviously along with Acting Company producer Margot Harley and artistic director Ian Belknap, he deserves kudos for that as well.)  All of that, however, would have come to naught if Wilson also hadn’t wielded a master director’s hand at working with the actors, no matter how talented they are individually.  He guided them all into characterizations that perfectly fit the roles each actor plays in each adaptation, helping (or allowing) each performer to create characters often so different from one another that I wasn’t always able to detect immediately that they were the same actors I’d just seen in another part.  If nothing else, Wilson made Desire a showcase for excellent acting—not that I’d have expected anything less from the Acting Company. 

But the director did do more.  I covered some of the design and production elements with which I was impressed when I wrote about the physical production earlier so you know that there are some immensely clever aspects to the staging that lend the perfect touch to several of the plays.  (The bicycling sequences in Remembrance are one elegant example.)  Some are subtle and some blatant, depending on need and appropriateness.  Either Wilson is familiar with Williams’s concept of plastic theater (on which I’ve blogged: see “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theater,” 9 May 2012) or he succumbed to the pull of the idea because it’s embedded in Williams’s writing, even his prose.  His work with the actors, though, is just admirable.  Wilson’s not a show-off, but he’s decidedly more than a traffic director.  (I’ve seen his work in Tina Howe’s Chasing Manet, and Horton Foote’s The Orphans’ Home Cycle and Old Friends—blog reports dated 30 April 2009, 25 and 28 February 2010, and 10 October 2013.)  I could see his hand in each play, determining the performance style while still remaining true to the Williams dynamic that underlies each adaptation.  Of course, in this Wilson had to collaborate with the actors and the writers, but the director’s the final ringmaster.  I must, however, make a special mention of the acting in Resemblance, especially the work of Juliet Brett as Roe and Mickey Theis as Tom.  Both 20-something actors play children—Roe’s a ’tween or young teen on the verge of puberty and Tom’s still a little boy two years younger—without resorting to cliché or mugging; the portrayals are mostly predicated on how well the characters understand what’s happening to and around them, and that informs the rest of their behavior.  (The moment Roe has her first period, Brett’s Roe is terrified and Theis’s Tom is totally confused.  She runs off in horror; he dithers in bewilderment.)  As much as the success of that work depends on the actors, it also has to rely on the sensitivity of the director—especially to get the actors to work in tandem with one another.

It’s almost too hard to single out any performance as exemplary.  Not one portrayal was lacking, even the incidental ones.  If there were caricatures, such as Layley’s sorority sisters in Blue Children, they were called for; if there were emotional excesses, such as Anna’s in Oriflamme and Billy’s in Tent Worms, they came from Williams’s stories—and they were all handled with just the right touch to keep them within the world of Williams’s narrative.  I must single out one of Derek Smith’s depictions: Rodney (AKA “Hooch”) in Oriflamme.  I said he’s the only actor on the bill who’s name I recognized immediately, and even though he’s aged a bit since I saw him at 26, I knew him as soon as he appeared on stage in Tent Worms.  (The quality of his work hadn’t changed, I must add.)  He was still recognizable, though displaying a different persona, as Detective Bacon in Desire Quenched by Touch.  But when the lights came up on Oriflamme and this guy was sitting up on the back of the park bench, I had to check the program when the house light came up again to find that this was the same actor I thought I knew.  He not only looked different—that may have been partly due to the costume since he didn’t wear heavy character makeup or anything—but he was such a different person, even sounding different, I thought it was one of the other cast members.  That’s all acting, not directing or writing, and it was very exciting for an ex-actor to witness. 

I’ve already written about Liv Rooth’s work in Oriflamme and Juliett Brett’s and Mickey Theis’s in Resemblance.  Another stand-out performance is given by Yaegel T. Welch as Grand in Desire Quenched, who appears stalwart and straightforward until we get to see him in the flashbacks where we watch him mask a sadistic bent, fueled by a need for payback, with an almost clinical detachment as Grand bends and manhandles Burns in torturous ways as John Skelley’s Burns keeps begging for more.  As an acting job, it’s an exercise in control and objectification.  If the grisly ending doesn’t quite reconcile with the rest of the story or Welch’s character, that’s more on Williams (and probably Marcus Gardley) than Welch.

The rest of the company, which, as I said, made up a thoroughgoing ensemble, was first class and singling out a few doesn’t detract from the overall high standards the actors set.  These guys were just plain terrific.

In the press, the New York Times’ Charles Isherwood wrote that the Desire playlets “often breathe with the same fervent romanticism that marks [Williams’s] plays,” even as he acknowledged, “Some are more successful than others.”  Isherwood, however, was negative on the question of “whether second-guessing [Williams] himself . . . is a fruitful pastime.” the Timesman’s answer: “Over all, on the evidence of this production, I’d have to say no.”  In Long Island’s Newsday, Linda Winer called the collection “consistently engrossing and often ingenious” because she felt that “the playwrights . . . manage to evoke vivid themes and shadows of Williams without a hint of overheated parody or the loss of each individual voice.”  “Expertly directed,” asserted Winer, Desire “made me yearn to read the stories.” 

Jesse Green characterized Desire as “another in a series of theatrical misadventures that makes you question the management of the Tennessee Williams estate,” dubbing the stage adaptations “experiments in exploitation.“  Green stated, “I suppose I wouldn’t be complaining about this if any of the experiments were ever any good, but they’re not, and this latest one . . . is particularly annoying, like shaking up a soda can full of tired Tennessee-isms, then popping the top and letting it spray.”  The New York reviewer went on to disparage the directing of Michael Wilson, “who does not make a glorious showing here,” and the choice of stories, which “feels fairly random.”  Green acknowledged that “the performances . . . are the only generally successful elements of the endeavor.”  In the New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” column, the reviewer noted that “you can hear Tennessee Williams’s dramatis personae echoing through this evening of one-acts based on his short stories . . . .  Sometimes these echoes are the best bits, as several of the adaptations are merely workmanlike.” 

In Time Out New York, David Cote felt that “each playlet is both equal homage to a master and playful riff on a source” and that Desire “is satisfying in small, intense doses.”  Cote observed that “these stories are not subtle in their literary devices or symbolic gestures, and the plays are most interesting when the authors mitigate such flamboyant, combustible material with their own voice and vision.”  The man from TONY added that Wilson “directs an appealing, uniformly good ensemble” and concluded, “Most American playwrights working today owe some debt to Williams; it’s a pleasure, even inspiring, to see six give back.”

The Huffington Post’s David Finkle thought that adapting the Williams stories was a “wonderful idea” which Wilson directed “capably.”  He ended by acknowledging, “An added attraction of Desire . . . is that it makes reading or re-reading the short stories from which the six plays are derived a temptation too strong to resist.”  On CurtainUp, Simon Saltzman stated that the playlets “have been given mainly fine, often better than that, dramatic shape and form” by the adapters and are “all intentionally intoxicating” and have been “rhapsodically and on occasion rambunctiously staged ^.”  Saltzman concluded, “Though this collection will be most fulfilling for Williams devotees it will also entertain” others.  Talkin’ Broadway’s Howard Miller asserted that the adaptations in Desire range “from seamless translation from short story to play, to intriguing joining of Williams with the adaptor, to some of that unfortunate veering into caricature.”  Miller also praised the “very solid cast” and the “excellent scenic and projection design.” 

Marina Kennedy proclaimed on Broadway World that the stories in Desire have been “brilliantly adapted for the stage” and display “extraordinary direction” which area “audiences will not want to miss.”  “Each and every scene in Desire is entrancing,” Kennedy said, and the cast is “multi-talented.”  On TheaterMania, Zachary Stewart declared of Desire, “As with most evenings of one-acts, the results are hit-and-miss.”  John Gromada’s music is “dreamy,” said Stewart, “Russell H. Champa's lighting is similarly otherworldly,” while “Director Wilson exhibits a remarkable range.”  The one-act plays in Desire “offer a fascinating lesson in the art of adaptation,” wrote Jonathan Mandell of New York Theater.

  

Summer Shorts 2015, Series A

In July I was able to return to New York City for an extended period and I tried to catch up with some of what I’d been missing while I was commuting south and staying with my mother in Maryland for often long stretches.  My frequent theater companion, Diana, called me one evening and proposed catching several performances around town over the next week or so and, since I’d had to say no to her so many times in the preceding couple of years, I decided I’d take a flyer on some unpredictable experiences and (over)indulge myself.  The decision ended up taking Diana and me to four productions in six days.  I can’t say it all turned out for the best—but, of course, I couldn’t know that going in, could I?  You pays yer money and you takes yer chances.

Our first selection was part of the Summer Shorts series for 2015 at the 59E59 Theaters.  59E59 (which is located right where the name suggests, at 59 E. 59th Street) promotes the series, whose full title is Summer Shorts: Festival of New American Short Plays, as a “summer of new American one-acts featuring original plays by the country’s top playwrights.”  Now in its ninth year, the program “celebrates theater, summer and the short form,” say the producers, Throughline Artists (J. J. Kandel, producing director), offering a variety of voices, styles, and subjects.  The Festival is divided into two series, A and B, each intermissionless, hour-and-a-half part consisting of three one-act plays; Series A runs from 17 July to 28 August and Series B from 25 July to 29 August. 

The 59E59 Theaters were founded by the Elysabeth Kleinhans Theatrical Foundation, a not-for-profit operating foundation led by 59E59 president and artistic director Kleinhans, which was established to create a state-of-the-art Off-Broadway theater complex for new and experimental work by non-profit producing companies from across the U.S. and around the world.  In 2002, the building at 59 East 59th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues in Manhattan, was donated to the Foundation.  Architect Leo Modrcin essentially gutted the building and designed three performance spaces to provide support for theater troupes.  The largest space, the 196-seat Theater A on the second floor (the first floor houses the box office; there is also a bar on the second floor), opened in February 2004 with the first performance of Terrence McNally’s The Stendhal Syndrome produced by then resident company, Primary Stages.  (I saw this Stendhal, long before ROT started, as well as several other of Primary Stages’ productions at 59E59.)  In April 2004, the two other houses, Theaters B and C (98 seats and a 50-70-seat black box, respectively) on the third floor, opened with productions for the first Brits Off Broadway Festival (of which annual series I’ve seen only one presentation: 2007’s Memory, a Welsh production from Clwyd Theatr Cymru by playwright Jonathan Lichtenstein).  59E59 hosts many series (another of which I’ll be reporting on next), as you can see, some annual events and others one-offs, but the multiplex’s main program is the 5A Season, a series of five new American and international plays (which are presented in Theater A, hence the name).  Shows and programs at 59E59, which won a Drama Desk Award for Excellence in Theatre in 2008, generally run for three to six weeks. 

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Diana and I went over to 59E59 on Sunday, 19 July, to catch the 7:15 p.m. performance of Series A in Theater B.  (Sounds like something from a Danny Kaye movie or the set-up of a Marx Brothers joke.)  The playlets (all about half an hour) are well-enough written for the most part, and they are well-acted (by different casts for each show) and -directed, but none go anywhere or say much of anything.  They all have a sort of gimmick that I gather is supposed the be the dramaturgical element that sustains them, but doesn’t.  (The plays, though, were competently written enough as far as dialogue is concerned, even if the content didn’t amount to anything in the end, that I wouldn’t be surprised if the first and second pieces, both two-handers, didn’t show up in many acting classes soon if the texts become available.  They’re the kind of material actors like to work with.)

10K, written and directed by Neil LaBute, recounts the meeting of a Man (J. J. Kandel) and a Woman (Clea Alsip) on a wooded path while getting ready to jog.  We don’t know if it’s an accident or if it was planned or if it’s the first encounter or the latest in a long string.  10K’s characterized in the publicity material as “a suburban mystery shot through with humor and tension and desire.”  Well, only a little.  10K, which isn’t as raw or outrageous as LaBute’s higher-voltage works (Fat Pig, 2004; reasons to be pretty, 2009), is set in a park somewhere.  (On one page of 59E59’s website, the series is subtitled “Stories from the Five Boroughs” and, indeed, the other playlets are set in Grand Central Station and a coffee shop somewhere near Ground Zero.  But we never actually learn where 10K takes place, except that it’s in a wooded area of a park like, perhaps, Central Park or Prospect Park.  It needn’t even be in New York City.)  The Woman and the Man, each unhappily married to someone else (whom we never meet), end up running together.  We learn a lot about each of them (not all of it complimentary: in Time Out New York, the reviewer mentions “one Bad Mommy confession that will make you want to call child protective services.”   Why these folks would reveal such intimacies to a stranger, I wondered) and it looks like a romance (or at least a hook-up) might be about to start—but it doesn’t.  The gag is that almost the whole play takes place while the two characters are jogging (a few breaks to change things up a little).  The actors face the audience and “run” in place as they talk.  (It must be a hard play to perform since for the whole half hour or so, the actors are essentially jogging, even if they don’t go anywhere.  Like the play.  The New York Times’ Alexis Soloski quipped: “Let’s hope someone hands them rehydration salts as soon as they come offstage.”) 

Playlet #2, Glenburn 12 WP (the name of a top-shelf whiskey), is by Vickie Ramirez and directed by Kel Haney.  It’s the encounter between a young man (W. Tre Davis) and a young woman (Tanis Parenteau) who walk into an Irish bar at Grand Central Station.  They’ve each ostensibly come in for a quick drink on the way home but the saloon’s apparently deserted, the bartender strangely absent.  The two strangers have the run of the place and what ensues is a conversation between them in the empty bar, and as the liquor starts to flow, so do some inconvenient truths.  Troy, the young man (who didn’t really look legal to me!), is black (there’s a “die-in” protest against police violence going on in the station, but that’s little more than a backdrop that gets overused without being dramatically significance).  The gimmick here is that Roberta is Native American (“Indian,” she insists).  Ramirez makes some significance of this—she is a Tuscarora Indian herself—but in the end it doesn’t actually bear on the play’s main action—just much of the conversation that pretty much merely delays the climax.  (To paraphrase former late-night TV host Craig Ferguson from a sketch series he used to do: There’s been a murder.)  The whole thing is very contrived and set-up.

The closer is Matthew Lopez’s The Sentinels, directed by Stephen Brackett.  (Lopez’s best-known work is probably The Whipping Man, presented in 2011 by the Manhattan Theatre Club at New York City Center.)  Once a year in September, Alice (Meg Gibson), Christa (Kellie Overbey), and Kelly (Michelle Beck) gather at a small downtown coffee shop for breakfast (where their regular waitress is played by Zuzanna Szadkowski).  There the three woman catch up on each other’s lives and remember another September morning many years ago, 11 September 2001.  The women are all widows of 9/11; their husbands (whom we never meet) worked in a company whose office was in the World Trade Center.  The most obvious trick is in this third play: the story is told backwards, from 2011 to 2000, starting with the day after the third man was hired and the executives and their wives have dinner at Windows on the World.  Nothing, however, is revealed and the connection to 9/11 might as well be to a fire or an earthquake.  Sentinels is little more than a character study of the three widows.

The technical production is all handled by one 59E59 team, and it’s kept to a bare minimum.  10K’s set was the background of some other play, for instance, with the suggestion of forestry provided by the actors—like a poor man’s Wooden O holding the vasty fields of France.  (The remains of the constructed set, a wood-paneled interior, are simply there but ignored.)  For Sentinels, the luncheonette table and chairs are merely set on stage amidst the wood paneling; a bar is moved on stage for Glenburn, for which the constructed set may even have been built (or it may just have been usurped).  The settings were designed by Rebecca Lord-Surratt, the costumes by Dede Ayite, the lighting by Greg MacPherson, and the sound by Nick Moore; it’s all in the practical/utilitarian vein and perfectly functional. 

For me, these three short plays aren’t interesting enough to warrant going back for Series B, but the press didn’t altogether agree with me.  Of 10K, the Times’ Soloski wrote, “You can feel the playwright’s manipulations, but the play is vigorously performed”; however, she noted that Glenburn, in which she found “some stiffness to the writing,” “starts slowly, develops admirably and ends implausibly.”  Soloski acknowledged that we probably “don’t need another 9/11 play,” but asserted that Sentinels is “elegantly constructed and under Stephen Brackett’s direction, gracefully performed.”  The New Yorker, saying that the series “airs private woes in public places,” pronounced: “Competently crafted and well acted, but trivial despite weighty subject matter, these plays, like that Scotch [in Glenburn], go down smooth, with almost no aftertaste.”  The unnamed reviewer dismissed 10K as “a pair of pent-up joggers [who] almost let their imaginations (and hormones) run away with them,” felt that Glenburn “has a premise like a joke in poor taste: a Native American lawyer and an African-American physicist walk into a bar . . . .  But there’s not so much a punch line as a literal skeleton in the closet,” and called Sentinels “maudlin.” 

At TONY, Raven Snook said that the overall program, is a “grab bag of the good, the not bad and the ugly.”  10K “is a physical tour de force,” the TONY reviewer decided, but it’s “the biggest miss” of the evening, with “characters [who] are nondescript ditherers you should run from.”  Sentinels’ “gimmicky reverse chronology doesn’t add to its insights,” she  asserted, even with a cast “all beautifully fleshing out skeletal roles.”  “The meat,” wrote Snook, “comes in the middle” with Ramirez’s Glenburn, which the TONY reviewer called “ smart and moving” because the “palpable chemistry” between Davis and Parenteau “leaves you wanting more time with these folks but is perfect as it is.”  She characterized the playlet as “a politically charged conversation with wit, intelligence and a perceptiveness about what it’s like to be a person of color in this country today.”  On Talkin’ Broadway, Howard Miller called 10K “an interesting study of two people who are playing with fire,” Glenburn “smart and engaging,” and Sentinel “sweet.”  Overall, Miller thought, “Solid performances make each of the plays well worth the visit, although a collective common theme would have been a good idea for linking them.”

CurtainUp reviewer Jacob Horn, as if in answer to TB’s Miller, posited,

It’s never been the style of Summer Shorts to arrange its series around an organizing theme, but in this year’s Series A, it’s almost as if the plays are tempting you to test different ways of locking them together.  While there’s still no central theme, the three one-acts have an uncanny way of echoing one another in ways that are reliably striking, if not necessarily of deep dramatic significance.

The first two plays are, in fact, thematically similar: they offer examples of men and woman meeting under unusual circumstances and somehow attempting to use one another.  The second and third plays, meanwhile, are grounded in recent history and explore how individuals relate to the larger movements that arise in the aftermath of tragedy.  The first and third plays both include similar conversations about the ‘ideal’ gender to have as a child; the second and third both happen to feature women who really like their whiskey. 

I think Horn’s reaching: I suspect you could contrive some apparent connection between any two plays.  (I found the gimmicks, after all—though I don’t see that as a connection, just a pattern.)  The CU review-writer went on to say that “these unconnected plays do overlap and adjoin.  Seeing how one treats a topic can color how you view another’s approach, which winds up being more satisfying than a lineup of shows that are truly disconnected from one another.”  He dubbed 10K “a suburban psychological thriller of sorts . . . where every line is loaded with hidden meaning.”  The actors, Alsip and Kandel, “are carefully attentive to subtlety and nuance,” Horn asserted.  Even if 10K “occasionally layers on the air of mystery a bit too thick,” the CU reviewer allowed, “there’s also something disarmingly real about the man and woman’s conversation.”  As for Glenburn, Horn felt that while “Davis and Parenteau have good stage chemistry” and the play’s “sharp commentary on race relations and elucidations of minority perspectives in contemporary America are jarring in a welcome, insightful way,” its “eventual rapid escalation feels somewhat incongruous.”  Sentinels, Horn wrote, displays an “artfully deployed timeline,” and the cast gives “sensitive portrayals.”  Of the three playlets, “though the short scenes of the short play don’t leave room for much nuance,” Horn felt that Lopez’s is “the most emotionally affecting.” 

[I returned to 59E59 a couple of days later to see Bette Davis Ain’t for Sissies, part of the theater’s East to Edinburgh series.  Come back to ROT in a few days to read what I gleaned from that performance.  ~Rick]