|
Past Reviews Off Broadway Reviews |
|
The first and sketchiest of these is titled Unstuck, directed by Laura Savia and written by Lucy Thurber, a 2014 Obie winner for her five-play cycle The Hill Town Plays and a playwright whose work shows up with some regularity at various New York venues. Here, however, she does little more than bring together a collection of quirky characters to tell the story of Pete (Alfredo Narciso), who has fallen into a funk he can't seem to pull himself out of. It is Pete's birthday. While he awaits the arrival home of his girlfriend Deirdre (KK Moggie), he is visited by his sister Jackie (Lauren Blumenfeld), who wants him to critique her tap dancing, and then by someone named Sara (Carmen Zilles), who brings him a cupcake and serenades him with a song by the rock band Ambrosia. Will any of the three women in his life be able to get him off the couch and face the world again? More substantially, the middle play, Built, written and directed by Robert O'Hara, relates the story of a middle-aged former teacher (Merritt Janson) who invites a male prostitute into her home for a sexual encounter. Her guest, it seems, is Mason (Justin Bernegger), with whom she had a hot and heavy relationship when he was her 15-year-old student ten years previously. It should be noted that Mr. Bernegger's nude or nearly nude physique is on prominent display through most of the play. Whether you find the nudity and the sexual tension to be thrilling or off-putting, the playwright does have much to say about issues of power, seduction, rape, and entrapment. Strongest of all is the final work, Stella Fawn Ragsdale's Love Letters to a Dictator, a solo piece that is a mixture of off-beat comedy and gentle lyricism. In it, an eccentric character with the same name as the playwright (played with utter conviction by Colby Minifie) engages in an exchange of letters with Kim Jong-il in the months prior to his death in 2011. She tells him that she saw his picture in the paper and thought he was "lonely and felt bad" about himself. It is, of course, Stella who is feeling lonely and badly about herself for deserting her family in East Tennessee when she took off to try to make it as a writer in New York. She is leading an isolated existence on a farm in the Hudson Valley, where she writes and makes dried flower arrangements. The play's text is comprised of a series of letters between Stella and the dictator, in which, while she is advising him on how to be a kinder and gentler leader and father to his exiled son, she is working through her relationship with her own family. Ms. Ragsdale's play, well directed by Logan Vaughn, makes for a memorable ending to the 75-minute evening of short works. The playwright displays a real gift for bringing out the lonely and struggling heart of her character and offers up an original theatrical voice to be reckoned with.
Summer Shorts 2015, Series B
|
