This weekend the "Undergraduate Playwriting Festival" held staged readings of four original plays written by undergraduates in the packed upstairs space of the Production Workshop. The two-hour performance, which ran Friday and Saturday, began with "Escape from Quality Manor," written and directed by Brendan Pelsue '08. "Escape" recounts the tale of Craigue, a girl with debilitating obesity in the confines of a nursing home who suffers under the torment of her parents and pines for a boy who apparently requites her feelings. Craigue, played by Alice Winslow '08, lends humor to the tragic tale with her dry, simple narrations.
The reading involved minimal staging, with Winslow sitting in front of a line-up of the supporting characters. Among the most entertaining of Craigue's tormenters were Alexandra Panzer '08 as Craigue's cruel mother and Kyle Dacuyan '11 as the unfeeling Nurse Daniel. The play comes to a head when the object of Craigue's affection comes to spring her from the nursing home prison. Though, naturally, things do not go as anticipated, the ending was a bit disappointing - the closing message read like a public service announcement.
The second play of the evening - "Morgan's Soul Food Cafe" - focused on an all-night coffee shop that might be purgatory and the pair of sassy waitresses just trying to save a few yuppie souls. This strong entry was written by Audrey Chait '11 and directed by Emily Toner '10. Andrea Dillon '11 was particularly compelling as Gwen, the junior waitress and apprentice soul-saver who develops feelings for one of the yuppie customers.
While most of the poor businessmen enter and exit via the sinister trap door, it takes a rare hand to make it out the divine front door. This funny and clever play actually benefitted from the read stage directions, which verbally acknowledged an "awkward pause" and "fourth wall moment."
The third play, "Sunlight on Shadows," written by Alice Huang '10 and directed by Rich Ellis '10 was the most serious script of quartet. The scenes teased out the ambiguous relationship between conflicted immigrant Mary (Marsida Domi '10) and Lyla (Daria Marinelli '10). Lyla is the blissfully imaginative blind woman who may be Mary's neighbor, inner self or something else altogether. This relationship is clarified over the course of the performance, as the omnipotent authority seems to shift back and forth between the two women.
This play explored some interesting ideas, but it ran a little too long and featured too much verbal exposition from its characters. The depressing tale relied on sometimes cliche imagery and a would-be sinister nursery rhyme repetition that only served to undermine the spare, tragic mood of the scenes. But a passionate performance from Domi was compelling and, ultimately, the twisty ending worked, even if the audience may have seen it coming.
The darkest performance of the evening was followed by the lightest - "The Fishbowl Chronicles," written by Alex Rosenthal '08 and directed by Dan Rogers '08. In a set-up that crosses a game-show setting with a hilarious spoof of experimental theater, the three main characters are, in fact, actors, who are wearing fishbowls over their heads. The actors - Alicia Coneys '09, Adam Mazer '08 and Justin O'Neill '11 - continued to run through a series of lettered scenes, the order of which hinged on choices presented to the audience. According to "The Keeper" - Chrissie Bodznick '10 - the audience must continue to choose scenes until they save the actors, or the actors run out of air. The whole business is presided over by Bodznick, wielding a bell and clearly modeling herself on the "fabulous" Orbit gum spokeswoman.
The silly scenes, in which Mazer and O'Neill vie for Coneys' affection while wearing implied "fishbowls" topped by funny hats, hinged on arbitrary decisions made by the audience. Often the same scenes were repeated again and again, including a hilarious song-and-dance number composed by "Anonymous," while the actors became increasingly anxious and distracted due to their depleting air supplies. As the situation became increasingly dire, an act of intervention by a clever audience member managed to save the day.
