E-Mail This Article to a Friend Hail and farewell The sixth annual Boston Theater Marathon

Don’t worry, the Boston Theater Marathon may be on the move, but it isn’t going far. Next year, for its seventh edition, the BTM will leave the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, and the Boston Marathon route, for the more commodious new spaces of the Theatre Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts. The BTM will also be saying goodbye to its traditional Boston Marathon weekend time slot; next year’s edition is set for May 22. This past Sunday, as usual, 45 local theater companies sponsored 45 10-minute plays that ran from noon to 10 p.m., all coordinated by Boston Playwrights’ Theatre artistic director Kate Snodgrass and featuring the best of Boston’s directing and acting talent, not to mention packing the BPT and raising close to $17,000 for the Theatre Community Benevolent Fund. Here’s how our tag team of reviewers saw the action.

FROM NOON TO 3

On the Green Line after my marathon shift, I met a young woman from Rochester, New York, with her right foot in a protective boot. "Stress fracture?" "Uh-huh." She’d been planning to run in the "other" Boston marathon, so of course she was disappointed, but as she explained, when you’ve been training for and running in marathons for a few years, this is apt to happen. That’s the way I felt about the first three hours of this year’s BTM: disappointed, but also aware that one stress fracture in six years isn’t much to complain about.

The early winner, in my book, was Glenn Clifton’s Communication. Sponsored by Underground Railway Theater and directed by Greg Smucker, it gave us Miguel Cervantes as Larry Henderson, an unhappy adolescent who drags his Freudian-shrink mom and dad — Robert D. Murphy and Debra Wise — to the edge of a cliff so he can read them his poetry. At first, it looked like another boring beat-up on bad parents, but Larry’s poetry ("I am crying, crying, with no car") is hilariously awful, and the parents are black-comic smart (Mr. Henderson: "If I’m not interested in sleeping with your mother, you shouldn’t be either"). The cliff itself is an effective metaphor for the way Smucker keeps your sympathies teetering.

The kind of line that Smucker sends up ("You never pay any attention to me") was the stuff that other playwrights used in earnest. Ruth Housman’s A Play on Words had Barbara Mather and Noel Hoban using Scrabble to talk about their tired, boring relationship. William Donnelly’s Their Life in the Car, with Heather McNamara and Kevin LaVelle driving their way through life, merely glosses Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. John Oluwole Adekoje’s Love Jones featured Keith Moscoll in a stereotyped solo turn as a love-struck gangsta; Kathleen Rogers’s Mister Perfect only rides the surface of its intriguing — the title character is a "genetically modified organism" that combines the best features of man and dog — conceit. John Kuntz’s Cantaloupe Girlfriend falls into the monologue trap — three actors, Bill Mootos, Caroline Lawton, and Mia Anderson all talking to us and not to one another — while making an easy target of straight marriage. Dan Blask’s Abandon All Hope Ye Who Log In wastes its quartet of actors — Kuntz, Steven Barkhimer, Barlow Adamson, and Birgit Huppuch — on a ridiculous hardware-store/snuff-video premise; Shawn Sturnick’s Solomon, a Life is sentimental and superficial in using the "Solomon Grundy, born on Monday" nursery rhyme to do what e.e. cummings did immeasurably better in "anyone lived in a pretty how town." George Sauer’s Mosquitoes can’t decide whether it’s an AIDS-awareness-bashing play or not; George Spelvin’s Driving falls asleep at the wheel in its story of two men trying to drive to a party. Ed Bullins’s Spaces encompasses two different and equally incoherent story lines, far too much for 10 minutes. At least it has adult potential. Ted Cormey’s Absolute Zero Content drowns in adolescent clichés; Lindsay Joy’s Life, Love, and a 7-11 makes a bad joke out of convenience-store hold-ups; and Dennis Porter’s Billie makes a bad joke ("You don’t give a damn about my feelings, you never have") out of a couple looking for their runaway daughter.

— Jeffrey Gantz

FROM 3 TO 6

A successful 10-minute play is like an accelerating joyride down the freeway that comes to a swift end when you realize you’ve arrived at your exit but you haven’t slowed down enough: the sharp turn-off gives you a rush. A few of the plays in the BTM’s middle leg delivered that jolt, but more often the shorts finished in the same cruise control at which they’d been motoring.

Monica Bauer’s The Most Important Thing ranked among the speed demons. As Bill Mootos’s edgy John attempts to record a video profile with a dating service, his session with the woman conducting the interview comes to resemble a therapy session about relationships and dealing with tragedies, both national and personal. Just as you start to root for the pair to realize that they’re soul mates of sorts, John’s LA superficiality prevails. Alan Brody’s Annie and Issie also left with a gratifying lurch. Chicago-based Issie (Maureen Keiller) is visiting her strong-minded, God-loving sister, Annie (Kippy Goldfarb), whose Southern home has been surrounded by reporters and an angry mob for reasons having to do with the controversy that surrounded the 5300-pound Ten Commandments monument in an Alabama courthouse last fall. How Annie contends with the throng and her worried but peeved sister was treated with enough ambiguity to get us thinking about the broader issue.

Greg Lam’s Next October also hinges on real events, but he uses more of a home-town flavor to season his play. Wesley Savick directed this sports-fanatics-gone-religious satire in which Sox fans who were once a couple make the ultimate sacrifice — not watching a crucial game — because they’re convinced they’re bad luck. Their contribution to the team has orgasmic effects on the pair, much to the baffled chagrin of the man’s new girlfriend.

Santer-Baby is a quick coup that Rick Park can add to his comic-book-styled, over-the-top œuvre. When two old friends, trashy Bay State broads (Julie Perkins and Margaret Ann Brady in deliciously gaudy ’80s garb), bump into each other at the mall, they swap remembrances of "wicked awesome" things past and update each other on inadequate men present (and absent). Then Stacy (Dorothy Dwyer) appears and pregnant Lisa drops the bomb by revealing the status of her "friend."

Burlesque-caliber comedy is also achieved in Patrick Gabridge’s Den of Iniquity when a man is discovered by his wife in a shady dive and comes out as a "closet writer," a condition that’s dealt with as if it were a drug habit. And Eric Engel casts a goofy spell directing Patrick Vogelpohl’s The Rise of Hally, in which a Korean man who impersonates Harry Potter for children’s parties in Seoul cunningly skirts legal action for copyright infringement.

— Liza Weisstuch

FROM 6 TO 10

First the statistics: four hours of highly choreographed playlets that slid easily, quickly, gracefully, on and off stage, ending as scheduled thanks to the large crew of techies. The 18 works were distinguished by a wide variety of subjects, some stellar performances by the local acting community, and some adroit staging by directors Nora Hussey, Carmel O’Reilly, Kevin Fennessy, Judy Braha, and David Wheeler among others.

Pride of place within this group of playwrights belonged to Kirsten Greenidge for her mysterious, metaphoric exploration of a proper white woman’s psyche in Joan and Michael on Cisco Beach, which was directed by Shilarna Stokes. Greenidge created a whole time, place, and situation in her 10 minutes as a little black girl advanced on a white woman and asked to be taken in. The play could be expanded, but the compression of action, with no time to explain either the identity beyond the obvious of the four characters or their motivations, added a tantalizing challenge to the imagination.

Sharing top honors, but in a humorous vein, was Jack Neary’s Keeper of the Curse, which was well timed in following the Red Sox’ afternoon loss to the Yankees and well acted by Andrew Dolan as the custodian of the Curse and Chris Loftus as a certain Theo. Directed by Neary himself, the play unrolled in farce fashion, true to its own fantastic logic with a surprise punch at the end. Dolan’s performance as the Red Sox fan who had sold out to the Yankees was most properly deranged and probably true-to-life.

Stoneham Theatre’s offbeat entry, Timothy Sawicki’s Amphibians, had two sea creatures debating whether to leave their safe watery haven for the adventure of the ooze and warm slime up there in a dream place where there might be crisp lettuce on which to munch. Shelley Bolman and David J. Hansen provided the appealing ardor of college freshmen seeing campus for the first time. Another playlet with an odd tilt was Joe Byers’s Chickenworks, which is about the inner workings of a chicken-kill plant that is guaranteed to make even the most hardened gut swear off the Colonel’s secret recipe and McNuggets. The tour was narrated by Maureen Keiller as Henrietta Hegatry, complete with clucks and tucking of wings.

Two plays focused on actor talk. Carl A. Rossi’s Sir and the A.S.M. was built on backstage superstitions, especially those surrounding Shakespeare’s "Scottish play," and enhanced by Ed Peed’s hysterical portrayal of "Sir," the pretentious, gin-slugging, over-ripe actor accosted by the new Assistant Stage Manager, Colin Hamell, who aimed to please. The two women in Susanna Ralli’s The Lady and the Maid exchanged roles while haranguing each other about the value of the actor’s improvising dialogue instead of sticking to the playwright’s lines, a situation that sometimes spills over from rehearsal to performance. Ted Reinstein’s SWF Seeks WMD took on the backstage banter — with an edge — of a liberal versus a conservative as they waited to appear on a talk show.

More muted were Jon Lipsky’s treatise on a failed father-daughter relationship, The Drum, and Israel Horovitz’s monologue about an elderly Cat Lady, which was saved only by Nancy E. Carroll’s poignant performance. Robert Brustein and two American Repertory Theatre regulars, Will LeBow and Remo Airaldi, under the direction of David Wheeler, contributed Terrorist Skit, a funny shtick in which Osama bin Laden and the ghost of Mohammed Ata spouted Yiddish insults and berated each other over the events of September 11, which turned one into a CNN celebrity and the other into ashes.

Richard McElvain in The Drum, Bobbie Steinbach in Tom Grady’s I Love You Virus, and Kippy Goldfarb in Janet Kenney’s Ma in Her Kerchief made their plays a pleasure to watch, giving every segment of the theatrical community — all of whom are volunteers for this project — a right to be proud. As always, kudos to Kate Snodgrass for pulling it off.

— Iris Fanger