Review: Perishable’s Women’s Playwriting Festival
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
The good, passionate minds at Perishable Theatre are defining their 15th annual International Women's Playwriting Festival (and an entire season devoted to women playwrights) with the bleak assessment that more than 80 percent of produced plays are written by men.
Which puts the stakes pretty high on this trio of plays chosen to open a season meant to nudge the inertia-bound supertanker of male-dominated theater. Are these three playwrights: Laura Jacqmin, Kit Idaszak, and Mary F. Unser, ready for prime time? The big time?
Generally yes.
Teen sex and stairwell struggles
Let's begin with This Is How, Chicagoan Laura Jacqmin's look at a modern American high school stairwell where the sex-for-$20 of every parent's nightmares take place. Credit to the playwright for facing what girls do for money, what boys pay money for, and how light the original discussion between Eli and Christian,
played appropriately faux-bravado by Clayon McFarlane and Sam Hood, is. And credit to Erin Sheehan's (left, with McFarlane) heart-breaking acceptance of her "job" in the stairwell, no more heartbreakingly evident than when she takes the girlish chewing gum out of her mouth for business. And then pulls her darling red hair back in a ponytail... for business.In its short running time, this short play does have to make too sudden a turn to confessions between customer and server, that lead to a too-quick reach for real intimacy amid the oral sex. The players do as well as they can, but this is, in fact, the kind of work that demands a deeper treatment for the arcs to make sense.
Military sex and latrine violence
The vision that opens Kit Idaszak's much-more-fully realized piece, The Golden Lasso, is of a girl playing with her doll. But in this case, the girl is Diana, a desert-camo-fatigued young soldier, and the doll is her beloved Wonder Woman action figure. Diana, strongly and compellingly realized by the wonderful Jing Xu (below right), misses her girlfriend and spends Skype time trying to stay connected while the ominous boredom of wartime living frays their lines. The beauty of the early scenes of
Idaszak's work is that she's created lesbian characters, dialogue, and a battlefield setting that all feel completely real. It's wonderfully refreshing, and a statement about how gay men and women deserve to be written, and portrayed, in theater.
But in comes the man, and although Jo-'an Peralta does his best to give Diana's sergeant the right blend of macho and vulnerability to make some kind of motivation for what flips to a brutal scene in the latrine, it's not enough. Not in text nor in performance, and the very strong play loses its momentum through the crisis.
As the focus returns to the fascinating nuance that Xu conveys, however, the play regains its footing, and one does feel the case for women telling universal stories, earning those stolen percentage points back from the guys.GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST
No sex and office mayhem
The pop style of the final piece of the trio, Swingin' With Petula, sustains some early fun with brightly-colored office equipment and some whipcrack, inscrutable office chatter among three women (Tray Gearing, Katie Travers, and Kaitlyn Vollucci) who work the graveyard shift in a faceless company with vague output that involves word processing, tables, graphics and scanning.
It all begins to feel vaguely theater of the absurd (there are two Julies, then a Titania, right?), and just when it's getting meta (is this about the interior of playwright Mary F. Unser's divided mind while she writes all night long?), the story seems to stay on the literal side of the tracks. Is it really a latter-day, outsourcing version of Nine to Five? Unfortunately, this is how it plays, and takes away some of the victories earned earlier in the evening.
Two steps forward
But forward the game does advance, and especially in the embodiment of Diana, a woman-loving woman soldier who fights and struggles, Golden Lasso in hand, in a man's inhospitable landscape. Not a bad metaphor, that last bit, for what women playrights face. Let's see what Perishable offers next.
Related Articles
- Heather Henson Carries on her Father’s Legacy
- Review: Pilobolus Opens FirstWorks Festival
- Review: Trinity Rep’s Camelot
- Lynda Benglis Opens at RISD Museum
- Pixilerations: Cutting-Edge Digital Media Takes Over Providence
