Geva Theatre’s Regional
Playwrights Festival offers a reminder that Rochester
is home to some truly creative talent. It’s a chance to get inspired by the
work going on in your back yard, and get a preview of plays that could soon end
up on the stage. The 2006 fest took place May 6, with a full reading of Rahn S. D’Agostino’sThe Okapi, and May 8, with an evening of
one-act plays.
I attended the May 8 show and found that two of the
selections were practically ready for the boards. Peter Tonery’sUndone tells a seduction story, of
sorts, as a military recruiter tries to convince a seemingly unsure young man
that Army life is for him. The believable dialogue really makes the play, as
practically every word out of Lieutenant Barry Giles’ exposes him as a shyster
more than a soldier, someone who knows precisely which buttons to push to make
a sale. Even as we’re repulsed by the base manipulations, it’s impossible to deny
the beauty of well-honed craft.
On the more light-hearted side, I fell in love a little bit
with Johanna Mary Lester and her One of
These Days. In what could be subtitled “How Barry Manilow
Ruined What Could Have Been My Great Romance,” a man and a woman take turns
explaining to a psychiatrist (in different appointments) why their
“relationship” doesn’t work. The staging of the piece — with the psychiatrist
sitting between them, representing the divide in time but still responding to
one of the participants or the other — is perhaps too clever. I lost track of
who was trying to make which point (although that could have been intentional).
But that’s nitpicking: Lester’s script is full of so many gold-coin lines that
she’s a millionaire with words. The comparing of frustrating loved ones to dust
under your fingernails; the story of inadvertently breaking up with someone via
greeting card: Lester nails the crippling narcissism of America’s
20- and 30 somethings, and makes us laugh even as she
reveals how utterly broken we are.
Also promising were I Like Art by Joseph Sorrentino
(who occasionally writes for City)
and Pea Soup by Nancy Preston Stark. Art has a charming conceit, as two
people — one a self-important artiste,
the other a blue-collar mooch — chat about art at a gallery opening. The play
hits its stride when the two launch into a gag inspired by Abbott and
Costello’s classic “Who’s On First” routine, in which confusion over Japanese
Noh theater and just plain no theater leads to some hearty laughs.
Unfortunately, the gag doesn’t really progress beyond that, and ends up
circling the same territory over and over again.
Stark’s Pea Soup tackles a teenage girl’s struggle with identity as she approaches her male
teacher with the question of nature vs. nurture, and then drops a bombshell.
Things unravel quickly from there, leaving the teacher in what one audience
member called “a man’s worst nightmare.” Stark has a lock on the teen psyche,
and it’s a fairly frightful place to behold. The teacher’s role in the play is
a bit more problematic: he switches from seemingly aloof to over-invested
in a heartbeat. Still, the ambiguous resolution struck a nerve with many in the
crowd, and the piece has a lot of promise.
The last play of the night, Mark Witteveen’sThe American Bar, is the one that
needs the most work. I’m hopeful that Witteveen will
take some of the audience’s comments from the question-and-answer session into
consideration, especially regarding the big narrative twist that the entire
play hinges on. As it stands, it’s confusing at best.
If there’s one bit of advice I’d offer all the playwrights,
it would be to be their own harshest editors. Every one of the scripts could be
tightened up in parts, which would make some already impressive plays even more
worthy of praise.
This article appears in May 17-23, 2006.
