Theater slam

[magid]

Last night I went to SLAM Boston, a short play competition, at the BCA. It was in one of the black box spaces, in front of the set for another show.

The rules: each play was supposed to be 10 minutes, with a maximum of 14 minutes. There were 5 judges in the audience who had no affiliation to anyone in any of the plays who were to rate each play on writing, directing, and acting, a single score from 1 to 10 for all three. Decimals were "encouraged," though the MC seemed surprised when he got a score or two into the hundred-thousandths (Hey, he didn't restrict the number of decimal places! He's just lucky no one gave a score of 3π!). The highest and lowest scores were dropped, and the other three scores totaled. After all the shows, the judges were given a surprise 0.5 to give to any show, just in case they thought there was one they'd underrated.

The MC was awesome. He joked about how the judges should get their low scores out of their system early, and there was a one-man musical that had volunteered to be "the sacrifice," going first.... and then came back and sang about the slam. It was incredibly funny, and I'm sure there are references I missed. The only part I could have done without quite so much of over the course of the evening was his referee whistle.

The shows, in performance order:

1. Face Time (R. D. Murphy) was set at Logan Airport, the meeting of two scammers. One did cold calls on refinancing mortgages, the other was a face to Nigerian spam (though technically, he was supposed to be from the Ivory Coast). The tables kept turning until the last minute for who would sucker whom. I never quite got into this one. It was competent, but felt too slight.
   
2. Step Two (EP Dowell) is about a couple considering the next step, having children. He doesn't even want to have the conversation for a while, but in the end, it ends up rosy... until the last line, "But what will your wife say?" (obviously, the assumption is that this must be a cheating affair. Even were it not, a decision as big as having children would require consent all around...).
   
3. Please Pass the Salt (Debbie Weiss) is a family dinner, with everyone involved in conversation, but not with each other; everyone's on their cell phones. The husband has a business deal and what sounds like a mistress, the son talks with a friend, the daughter comments on the food and passes girl gossip along, and the mother seems off in a cheery, wine-induced haze much of the time, then talks recipes with her friend. It was cute, the conversation carefully timed, but ultimately not quite satisfying.
   
4. Dressed Up Like a Douche (Rick Park) was the funniest of the plays, with two teen-aged boys debating the lyrics of a certain song. One was stoned, and very creative in his explanations, which ranged from desert nomads descended from French aristocrat villains to the shopping carts at Market Basket. Totally hysterical stuff, though the end felt like it didn't live up to the same level.
   
5. I Am a Black Girl (Francesca Sanders) is a one-woman play, a monologue by a white girl, raised in the 60s by liberal parents who took her to marches and lived in mixed race areas, who wanted to think of herself as a black girl, really. I'm not sure whether it was the actor or the writing, but while I could see the point, it fell flat.
   
6. Safely Assumed (Andrea Fleck Clardy) is an older white woman and a younger black man (/teen) meeting at the probation office, waiting to see their probation officers. She's there because she can't stop shoplifting, and someone finally pressed charges against the little old woman. He said that he was there for the same thing, though he hadn't done it; he'd had a previous brush with the law, so now he's got probation. He describes shopping while black, and she offers to lift whatever he wants while the security focuses on him. At which point the tables turn, and he says that he might not be 16, he might be a probation officer dressed in homeboy clothes, hanging around the waiting room to find out what people are up to, and she's now inciting an under-aged person to crime. Which flusters her. And then he's called in. (This one won, squeaking past Douche.)
   
7. Twenty Years (Candace Perry) was about a gay couple advertising for a lesbian couple to birth and coparent a child with them for 20 years. It was nicely done how the couples weren't shown on stage together until the last scene, just talking about meeting the other in the interim.
   
8. In Bloom (Jennifer McCartney) was about a make-up direct sales party, hosted by a woman who is a perfectionist and would like her husband to start reading her mind, since it would make things easier, and attended by a lush and a woman who (*gasp*) doesn't hate her wrinkles. Especially not enough to put makeup including exotic animal's excrement in it! Funny stuff.