We admit it: our theater critics aren’t marathoners. For this past weekend’s fourth annual Boston Theater Marathon, the Phoenix once again sent a relay team. Over the course of 10 hours, the three of us saw 50 10-minute plays (44 of them world premieres) written by 51 authors and presented by 50 theater companies performing on two stages at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, which annually presents the event in tandem with that other Boston marathon. Some 700 persons saw part or all of this year’s superb presentation (credit BTM artistic director Kate Snodgrass and her crew); the proceeds of $16,937 will benefit the Children’s AIDS Program at Boston Medical Center. Here’s the best of what we saw.
FROM NOON TO 3
The first three hours of the marathon were bookended by two hilarious comedies, Robert Brustein’s Anchorbimbo (American Repertory Theatre) and Jeffrey Bush’s Friedrichwilhelmhohenzollernstraße (Merrimack Repertory Theatre). Anchorbimbo is set in a CNN studio in New York and somewhere in Afghanistan, and the title lady isn’t just any anchorbimbo: Karen MacDonald comes out in the white Seven Year Itch dress and stands General Tommy R. Franks (Will Lebow) on his head ( " I thought you were dead, ma’am " ) with her Marilyn voice ( " I’ve never had a general before " and " You only get four stars if you’re a really big hit " ). She may think Franks is a sailor and not be able to pronounce the " really big long name " of the country he’s in, but she makes up for her journalistic shortcomings by singing " Happy Bombing to You. "
Marilyn’s just lucky she didn’t have to pronounce Friedrichwilhelmhohenzollernstraße. Jeffrey Bush’s play is set in a dingy room in the mythical East (or is it West?) Berlin street of the title, where, to the repeated incursions of a cheesy organ, two operatives (Keith Jochim and Bob Colonna) in trenchcoats and fedoras discover they’re working for the same firm and have apparently been sent to eliminate each other. After some uproarious exchanges ( " Manchester’s beaten Liverpool. " " You think that matters? " " No no, that’s the recognition code. " ) and drop-dead timing from Jochim and Colonna, " Old Bugger " and " Old Stinky " decide to brave the Volvos (or is it the Patrick VoPos?) and go home.
Janet Kenney’s More Than What (Coyote Theatre Company) takes place on the wedding day of Andrea (Helen McElwain) and Jack (Patrick Zeller): Andrea confesses that she once touched tongues with bridesmaid sister Melody (Alison Clear), but the real shocker is that, after the ceremony, she French-kissed bridesmaid Eve (Tanya Anderson). There’s no want of barbed irony (at one point Andrea is wearing three coats), but the probably lesbian Eve’s frank affection and then Andrea’s capacity to love everything — " Y.M.C.A. " and line dances as well as Jack — make this a winner. George Sauer’s The Red Squirrel (Centastage Performance Group) has Nate (Nathaniel McIntyre) visiting Stacy (Stacy Fischer) and her parents, who have set out a humane-animal trap for their red squirrel so it won’t eat all the morning birdseed; when Nate, kept awake by the trapped squirrel’s chattering, " solves " the problem by dumping " Red " in the lake, he discovers that Stacy’s love for animals might just exceed her love for him. More relationship problems surface in Alan Brody’s The Greatest Singer in the World (Pilgrim Theatre), where narcissistic rock star Orpheus (Kermit Dunkelberg) would rather be torn apart by his adoring fans than bring wife (and fellow star) Eurydice (Kim Mancuso) back up into the limelight. And in Michael Hammond’s The Lakshmi Impulse (Shakespeare & Company), where Price (Hammond) joins wife Gretchen (Karen MacDonald again) in bed after an intimate bathroom conversation with " Our Lady of the Nightlight, " whom he’s named Lakshmi. After some lively pillow talk ( " You’re jealous of our new nightlight? " " Lakshmi has to go, of course. " ), Price sacrifices his fantasy life — but Gretchen’s not a bad reality.
Leading the more serious efforts was Todd Hearon’s monologue Cornrockets (Bridge Theatre Company), where Eliza Fichter (like every other actor mentioned in this section, outstanding) plays a troubled boy whose mother and biological father are always at it, even during his Chucky Cheese birthday party. Christopher’s astronaut aspirations end bizarrely when a handbrake gets dislodged at the Grand Canyon and his parents soar into the great beyond.
— Jeffrey Gantz
FROM 3 TO 6
First, the comedies. Jerry Bisantz’s Romance 101 (Playwrights’ Platform), one of the best-received works of the afternoon, is a sweet and ridiculously condensed courtship tale, with chop-chop dialogue ( " Once, when I was a kid– " " Me, too! " ) and plenty of winks at the audience. ( " Things are different, " the heroine is told after she tries to reconcile with her lover. " A lot has happened in the last two minutes. " ) Another crowd pleaser was Rough & Tumble Theatre Company’s Lights! Camera! Blah!, in which the cast speaks almost nothing but the last word of the title, leaving us to guess what the characters are really saying. Just as I started to get sick of the gimmick, Irene Daly showed up as a cop who spoke her blahs with an Irish accent, and the whole thing seemed fresh again. Irish humor was also featured in Ronan Noone’s The Mutton Bandit Molloy (QE2 Players), a shaggy-dog story about sheep farmers supposedly driven mad by their wives’ inability to produce children. Colin Hamell is quite funny as a punster who assures his friend that he’s speaking the truth, " as sure as I’m standing here. " (He’s sitting down at the time.)
Even sillier was John Kuntz’s new solo piece The Mystery of Worcestershire Manor (Commonwealth Shakespeare Company), in which he plays seven characters with names like Mrs. Thorpgrinder and Mr. Kneegristle. In contrast to some of his recent works, there’s no attempt at poignancy here, but the murder-mystery spoof has some inspired bits, including a French maid’s death scene and a discourse on such oxymorons as " old girl. " Sandra Jaffe’s Leftovers (Jewish Theatre of New England) might be a comedy, but I didn’t catch much of the dialogue. It’s about a married couple driving to a funeral, and the two cast members stood behind a television playing a videotape shot from the point of view of a motorist making his way through Queens. The audience was transfixed by this flawlessly produced video, so the actors needn’t have memorized any lines. It was all " blah, blah, blah " to us anyway.
Among more serious pieces, Frank A. Shefton’s You (Our Place Theatre Company) was buoyed by Keith Mascoll as a man caught by his wife wearing her clothes. He’s not into cross-dressing, he insists — he’s just trying to capture some of her self-confidence ( " You are a strong sister who got it together " ). She may buy that, but I hope Shefton doesn’t expect us to. Lisa Seymour-Terry’s overwrought Diamond (Zeitgeist Stage Company) has another strong woman who has to set her husband straight: he’s been cheating on her while she’s been battling breast cancer.
The men aren’t much better in the Netherlands, if Deborah Lake Fortson’s Dear Nel (T.K. Productions) is any indication. A single mother is being harassed by a stalker, and no one can be bothered to help. ( " This kind of terrorist, no one cares about him. " ) Despite an odd framing device, the play has some effective imagery — especially involving the victim’s mother, who lives next door to the stalker and is afraid to turn a (literal) blind eye to the situation.
Patrick K. Brennan’s Get Out of My American Way (TheatreZone) pits an arrogant computer programmer against a human-resource manager who’s in a bit over her head; the playwright gives both characters a fighting chance to win our sympathy. And Andy Mitton’s well-paced What They Cast Down (Mad Horse Theatre Company), about the operator of a Ferris wheel and his brush with déjà vu, reminds us that carnivals are never as much fun on stage as they are in real life.
— Robert David Sullivan
FROM 6 TO 10
Taking Hamlet’s advice to " hold a mirror up to nature, " many of the playwrights in the BTM’s 6-10 time slot looked to current events for inspiration. Of the three plays on the subject of September 11, Bill Lattanzi’s Goodbuy/Goodbye (Huntington Theatre Company) was the most effective, largely because of the wrenching outpouring of emotions by Julie Jirousek as a woman who had lost her best friend. Israel Horovitz’s Ten Minutes Older (Gloucester Stage Company) is less a play than a recital of " Where was I when the Towers fell? " , but veteran actor Ken Baltin gave the musings a dignified reading, speaking in first person as the playwright. Ed Bullins’s " That " Day (New African Company) depends on the device of a narrator enhanced by a two-women chorus who mime his feelings while he waits for news about his daughter.
Jane Staab was cast as the widow of a man who lost his life in a random bombing — her husband picked up a boobytrapped child’s rucksack left on a London bench — in Susanna Ralli’s Gone Stone Cold (Wheelock Family Theatre). Staab ultimately discovers the woman’s anger as the motivating force of her outburst. And Theresa Rebeck hit paydirt with Art Appreciation (Lyric Stage Company). She had the clever idea of writing about the hiding place of the Gardner Museum’s missing Vermeer, The Concert, and was lucky enough to have Boston diva/actress Paula Plum as the batty woman who had stolen the painting. Rebeck balances exposition and character revelation; Plum combines stage savvy and comic timing to make the audience believe her.
Otherwise, the playwrights found subjects in more conventional areas: old age, the gender war, spoofs of Hollywood pretensions, and that favorite grazing place, backstage. Julie Phillips’s Tennessee Williams–inspired Carver Community Theatre Presents " Cats on a Hot Tin Roof " (New Repertory Theatre) gives us a maid on stage ironing a shirt for Brick. Problem is, Brick is in the toilet, throwing up from stage fright. In the time-honored tradition of The Torch-Bearers, Julie Perkins emotes up the walls, trying to cover his absence; and her interior monologue, a goofy misreading of acting classes the world over, is animated by the actor’s primal fear of an empty stage.
The single best piece of writing in this block was Mal de Mer (Súgán Theatre Company), by Leslie Epstein, a novelist who is also director of creative writing at Boston University. His vignette portrays a 15-year-old boy adrift — physically and emotionally — in a dingy with the man his mother wants to marry. Will Lyman as the suitor and Man Bartlett as her son are most poignantly at odds in their desires. The most hilarious gag — and a skillfully constructed vaudeville skit — was Jesse Kellerman’s ’Til Death Do Us Part (Wellfleet Harbor Actors’ Theatre), a riff on the film Thelma & Louise that finds Laura Lee Latreille as the antic Bride literally in the driver’s seat to take hapless Groom Robert Pemberton for a ride.
Dan Hunter’s The Monkey King (Boston Playwrights’ Theatre) was the only work to explore another culture, except for the West-meets-East encounter of an American couple and the administrator at a Chinese orphanage in Linda Button’s The Miracle of Zhen Zhen (Foothills Theatre in Worcester). Hunter’s play is set in Cambodia, where a belligerent guard interrogates a defiant prisoner who had been a dancer at the Royal Court. A life-long expert in the title role, the performer finds an unexpected ally when his character appears in full mask dancing behind him as his spiritual alter ego.
— Iris Fanger
