Staged readings

[magid]

This weekend I went to much of the inaugural Playwrights' Festival at Harvard. There were ten plays, the product of an advanced undergraduate seminar in play writing, which were put on by graduate actors (mostly; there were a few undergrads) and dramaturgs, plus professional directors.

This was the first time I've made it to the New College Theater on Holyoke Street, and it's pretty nice inside, at least the parts I saw. The plays were in a room on the third (top) floor, which worked nicely; the walls were solid most of the way up, then there was a ring of glass at the top, allowing sunlight in from all sides.

The plays I saw (I missed one, due to Hamlet):

• The Late Mr. Crawford (Sara Wright) was about a teenaged boy sent to live with his grandmother in the hopes that she'll straighten him out. She asks her teenaged helper to spy on him, to friend him and keep her informed. Which is all fine in the theoretical, but then he hosts a party when the grandmother is away, hooking up with the au pair's best friend. The best friend tells her not to tell, but she needs the job badly (her father's unemployed), and does. The grandson leaves with the best friend, and it's unclear whether the two girls will continue their friendship, and whether the grandson has severed all ties.
  The directing on this felt very static compared to later plays. The play itself was fine, but didn't thrill me.
  
• The Tortoise Won't Move (Pallas Snider) was about Ami and Gaia, two college girls vacationing in the Galapagos. Ami can't help but get involved with people, and they find that the woman they're staying with is not quite as she presents herself. She has a son, who is now out of prison after killing a pregnant woman. Except, as the scenes jump around in time, it's not quite that, after all. It boils down to all Galapagenos wanting to leave, but having no way to do so if a tourist doesn't take them away. Ami always wants to help, and almost takes one guy back, until Gaia makes her face practicalities.
  I thought the temporal shifts worked well, but it felt like the play shied away from describing just what had happened nine months before, which left things nebulous. It also felt like an odd topic; it made me wonder about the playwright.
  
• Verona Walls (Laura Hirschberg) was, basically, fan-fic on Romeo and Juliet, showing a story of Mercutio as a lady-killer, having his own romance before the other play starts. His lady love wants him to travel, and he, in the end, decides not to, at which point he is caught in the street fight towards the beginning of Romeo, and dies.
  It was a fun romp of a play, with lots of anachronisms and modern references woven in. Silly and funny, rather enjoyable.
  
• Morning Has Broken (Alexandra Petri) showed Steve, a student leader of a conservative Xtian group on campus, having a night with another boy. He regrets it, and ends up admitting it to his religious girl-friend, who wants him to go to a camp that will cure him of any gayness. Later scenes involve dream sequences with G-d and the Devil, and a talking pillow.
  Even though the play had to be cut short due to time constraints, which was a total shame, this play shone. The dialog was snappy, and the actors did a good job with it. The issues are real, but there was a lot of humor used throughout.
  
• In Between (Matthew Boher) was about college student David, who can't make up his mind which girl he wants, so meanders from one to the next, egged on by his friend and a Greek chorus, screwing up friendships as he goes, ending bereft of friends, girl or otherwise.
  The Greek chorus was amusing, but this felt, well, young. The technical side of the writing was fine, but the content wasn't all that gripping; it felt like the characters were flat.
  
• Breaking Up (Jack Cutmore-Scott) was also about a break up (and was eerily similar in a couple of lines at the very beginning to the previous play), but just one break up. Brian has just broken up with his girlfriend for another woman, and his flatmate offers to listen as he reenacts the event. Except that each time, things are left out. As the reenactments replay, more and more is added in, getting closer and closer to what happened... and how the flatmate was actually involved after all.
  I really enjoyed the acting on this one: one actor played Brian, and the other played all the other roles (flatmate, girlfriend, her ex, waiter), at times cycling through three of them in the course of three short sentences. It was impressive. The play was pretty good, though I had some questions afterward, about why the flatmate would have pushed at Brian to reenact things when he knew he had gotten involved before, and so on. It still worked as a whole, however.
  
• Tigermakers (Benjamin Glaser) was a 1930s era spoof of an adventure, following a Harvard grad student as he got caught up in the machinations of two groups angling for... well, something, in India. There were melodramatic speeches, period music, lots of overturns, and much spy-stuff, which all worked.
  That something is never made clear, which I thought would have worked had the play been shorter, but needed more detail for a play of this length.
  
• Dark Stuff (Lauren Weiss) was about a physics student home for the holidays, who gets along with only her cousin, and none of her other relatives, who don't understand what she studies, nor why she would choose to investigate dark matter. It was set up as a play happening in two modes, the real and the ideal, and there was a lot of concurrent conversation. Noticeable to me was the recurring use of Romeo and Juliet in the background.
  This was another play that had decent bones, but didn't quite work for me. The real/ideal split didn't feel so necessary to me, especially because the play wasn't that long. The hints of relationship between the girl and her younger (high school) male cousin served to rile the mother, but everything, in the end, was left unexplicated, with much dark matter.
  
• Still Life (Angela Sun) was described as a "whimsical revision of the Persephone myth," though to me, that would require the mother and daughter to have some kind of real relationship. In this retelling, the daughter died at birth, and went to live in heaven because Limbo had just been abolished, where she's annoying by the ministering angels, and has Gabriel go get her consumer goods on Earth. Her mother, meanwhile, lives in a room with live dolls, and phones her daughter as frequently as she can. Until they both end up falling into Hell. The daughter does have some kind of relationship with the Devilish Man, but in the end, mother and daughter are reunited.
  This was incredibly fantastical, with the live dolls/imps/angels adding emphasis. It felt more like a strange dreamscape than a coherent narrative. Interesting, I suppose, but not wholly to my taste.