mean?
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2nd Annual Short Play Festival
Posted by Gail M. Burns - March 2010
fes•ti•val
1. a day or time of religious or other celebration, marked by feasting, ceremonies, or other observances: the festival of Christmas; a Roman festival.
2. a periodic commemoration, anniversary, or celebration: an annual strawberry festival.
3. a period or program of festive activities, cultural events, or entertainment: a music festival.
4. gaiety; revelry; merrymaking.
We bandy the word “festival” around a lot these days, so I thought it was about time to take a look in the dictionary and see what it really means. In naming their Short Play Festival, Main Street Stage obviously had definition #3 above in mind. But notice that it contains the word “festive.”
fes•tive
1. pertaining to or suitable for a feast or festival: festive decorations; a festive meal.
2. joyous; merry: a festive mood.
No matter how you look at it, a festival should be festive in some sense. Even though they are not technically festivals, both the Berkshire Theatre Festival and the Williamstown Theatre Festival both manage an atmosphere of excitement. Our one true area arts festival, the Berkshire Fringe, also achieves an energy conducive to a sense of cultural exploration and fulfillment.
The atmosphere at Main Street Stage on opening night of the Second Annual Short Play Festival fell WAY short of festive. Words like gloomy, shabby, dismal, and amateur spring to mind. And the people I feel sorry for are the 400 playwrights who sent in their scripts with visions of something much closer to the scrappy, low-budget, high energy Berkshire Fringe in mind.
The good news is that 395 of them did not have their plays selected for production. The bad news is that five of them did. This is bad news for the playwrights, not for the audience. Out of the five pieces that fill (and I use that word loosely) 75 intermission-less minutes at Main Street Stage, only one is relatively lousy and it is mercifully short. Two – We Appear to Have Company by Greg Freier and Restraining Orders by Ruben Carbajal – are not plays but skits, one – The Shoe by Ralph Tropf – is a rather charming pastiche, and the remaining two – Something Like Loneliness by Ryan Dowler and Drip Torch by Trey Tatum – actually fit the definition of a short play.
Freier has a good idea in We Appear to Have Company. A veddy, veddy British couple discovers that there is a clown in their sitting room reading Dostoyevsky. This is unsettling to the wife, Emma (Jackie DeGiorgis), while her husband, Harold (Howard Cruse), seems to take the whole thing in stride, as the British often do. This Monty-Python-Meets-Harold-Pinter set-up has great potential, and I encourage Freier to develop it further. He might look at Pinter’s A Slight Ache for inspiration.
Directed by Sarah Rae Brown, Cruse is absolutely delightful and very, very funny. DeGiorgis, alas, does not have a British bone in her body and, despite a valiant effort, completely misses the mark.
Restraining Orders, directed by Andrew Bigelow, is just a mess. Its not funny, it’s badly acted, and the less said about it the better.
Which is why Dowler’s eloquent and poetic prose in Something Like Loneliness, directed by Brown, comes as a unexpected and delicious surprise. So does Mollie O. Remillard’s sensuous and delicate performance as Mia. She even manages to make the low-talking Mitch Bucciarelli, as Dan, look good. I see I called Bucciarelli a low-talker in my review of All My Sons at MSS. Speak up, Mr. Bucciarelli!
Sometimes short is just the right length. After a somewhat shocking opening line, Dowler unfolds his conceit like someone slowly unwrapping a gift. Indeed, the play is all about the giving and receiving of gifts, and their relative value. Although the gifts are tangible items on stage, what those little plastic boxes represent is far more valuable than anything they could ever contain.
The Shoe, directed by Alexia Trainor, is a refreshing and staunchly feminist take on the Cinderella story, told in Film Noire style. It isn’t perfect, but it is nicely played. Tropf should be encouraged to polish it a little bit more and he will have a real winner on his hands.
It was hard to judge the true merits of Tatum’s Drip Torch* because at the performance I saw director Jeremy Kerr was playing the male lead, Patrick, due to the illness of Will Fletcher. Directing and acting are two different things, and I could practically hear the gears turning in Kerr’s head as he tried to mold himself into a shape like what he had asked Fletcher to assume. Julia Les underplayed the role of Georgia Sullivan, but I cannot say whether her performance would have balanced Fletcher’s better than it did Kerr’s. The resulting muddle eclipsed the script, which gave me the impression that it crammed too much tragedy into too short a time period.
In his Program Note Festival Coordinator Eric K. Auld explains that the 29-member reading committee narrowed the field down to 20 before making the final cut. Having ascertained that their five favorites would run only 75 minutes, why didn’t they return to the remaining 15 and select a couple more to make a fuller, more festive, evening? The thought that the remaining 395 scripts were all completely unproduceable is too depressing to even contemplate.
Sadly, I think the answer is that this so-called “festival” is not about the playwrights but about the actors, who are a motley crew if there ever was one, ranging from excruciatingly amateur to woefully miscast to skilled and charming. And about a company who believes that low-budget means sloppy.
Sets and costumes are not Main Street Stage’s strong suit here, and whoever did give some slight thought to them wisely does not claim credit in the program. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it is neither difficult nor expensive to acquire a few keys pieces that will make your production look polished and professional. Last year the company successfully created a multi-purpose, easily manipulated modular set that worked well for the four plays they presented in their First Annual Short Play Festival, which, incidentally, ran for two hours with an intermission and was quite enjoyable.
Main Street Stage does not have enormous financial resources for festivities, but I wish that some time and effort, if not a few dollars, had been spent celebrating the authors of these five pieces. The program is your standard 8.5” x 11” paper folded lengthwise to form four pages, but it is printed in color on Staples “slightly better” grade of paper. I would rather have had a black and white program on cheap paper with an additional four sides containing bios of the playwrights than had the color, the semi-gloss, and the listing of all twenty-nine members of the SPF Reading Committee.
Main Street Stage’s Second Annual Short Play Festival runs March 5, 6, 12 & 13 a 8 p.m. Tickets are $15. Seating is limited. For reservations please call 413-663-3240.
*A drip torch is a hand-held device used by firefighters to set back fires. It consists of a fuel reservoir, a burner arm, and an igniter, and is used for dripping burning liquid fuel onto materials to be burned.