"This is not a production," said Professor of Literary Arts Paula Vogel at the introduction to Saturday night's performance of "New Plays Festival 24.1."
Vogel and Visiting Assistant Professor of Literary Art Bonnie Metzgar, the artistic director of the festival, were quick to tell audiences that the plays presented this weekend at McCormack Family Theater were collaborative projects developed over the course of two weeks and arrived essentially unfinished.
"At some point, we say, 'Okay, that's it, put it up on its feet,'" Vogel said of the plays' development.
All three plays in this edition of the New Plays Festival stood on their own this weekend, though some accomplished the feat better than others.
Dan LeFranc's "Bruise Easy," which opened Wednesday, sears the audience with its tale of two troubled siblings, Alec (Scott Raker GS) and Tess (Jessa Sherman GS). Tess returns home from Albuquerque, pregnant and looking for her mother. But her mother has disappeared, and Alec, a stoner with a camera, has been drifting through his days without her.
There's nothing fake about either the tone of conversation or the unsettling intimacy between Tess and Alec, and LeFranc gives them some fantastic lines in the course of the show. They're not completely comfortable with one another, and the dynamic plays out well onstage, particularly with Director Makaela Pollock GS's skillful use of available space. When else would you hear a brother react to a sister's mistakes with, "Well... that's... kind of slutty"?
Most interesting is the "legion of neighborhood kids," a Greek chorus in hoodies that surrounds Alec and Tess, breaking up scenes and cutting in on their thoughts. As the conflict between Alec and Tess heats up, so the legion intrudes more and more on the siblings' decisions, calling attention to the ways in which people pass judgment on each other.
As Alec and Tess take turns playing the skeptic and the believer for each other, "Bruise Easy" probes more deeply than is comfortable, but the characters never leave the circle of the audience's concern. Its moments of dark comedy are sublime, and topical references are sharp (the inclusion of a copy of James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" drew one of the biggest laughs of the night). The title, a meditation on motherhood, reflects on both the person Alec and Tess are missing and the person Tess is afraid she can't be.
Krista Knight '06's "Spoken Insects," which opened Thursday, unfolds in Quincy, Ill., on a trash-strewn stage variously serving as house, bedroom and farm. Molly, played by an effervescent Kimiye Corwin GS, delivers a Bible-tinged speech while pitching raw eggs off a corrugated roof (and sometimes onto the audience). Molly has latched onto her brother Eddy's girlfriend or wife (we're never quite sure which), Vail (Elizabeth Larson GS), for comfort, only leaving when she strikes a curiously calculating deal with her brother about Vail.
Yet while its toxic love triangle - involving Eddy, Vail and Molly - leads to some sublime moments, the play falls short of its southern Gothic aspirations, hampered by its embrace of stereotypes. Its flood imagery and salvation plot are Faulknerian in scope and poignancy, but jokes about duct tape and the unseen fifth character of "The Mormon," a proprietor of a local grocery store and the owner of a farm from which the characters steal, weigh down its admirable purpose and only draw attention to what is easiest to laugh at - usually curlers - and bathrobe-clad Georgia (Darcy Campbell).
Peter Sampieri, the director of "Spoken Insects," does admirably with the script, including a stellar bedroom scene played out in vertical. The actors also do enviable work, especially the belligerent Eddy (Kelby Akin GS), whose second role is central to the plot, and the introverted Vail. But by presenting its red-state stereotypes as truth, the play suspends belief and becomes more caricature than portrait. Certain images - Vail as a stubborn butterfly collector in a parking lot - are breathtaking in their brilliance, but Knight's language sometimes seems out of tune with her subject in particular scenes. By refusing to believe its own life-and-death themes, the play removes the audience from belief as well.
Of the three plays presented this past weekend, Cory Hinkle GS's "Cipher," which opened Friday, shows the most promise in this nascent stage. An Orwellian drama in miniature set among post-office bins and institutional doublespeak, the ciphers in question are Clerks B and A (played by the nearly identical Joe Donovan GS and Haas Regen GS), who are "trackers" trying to get "signals" on would-be terrorists. Georgia Cohen GS, a familiar face on the Brown stage, returns here in a potent supporting role as manipulative boss Masha, who with barely hidden malice pushes smarmy A and tortured B together onto one project so A can "watch for irregularity" in his silent co-worker.
What happens to the people who are "tracked" is the ominous cloud that makes "Cipher" hard to look away from, connected as it is to inter-scenic revelations about the clerks' previous occupations. In scenes that take place under a bare light bulb, Clerks A and B have names and a friend named Jen (Jane Pfitsch GS), who dresses in her brother's old clothes but won't talk about him. Eerie songs punctuate these scenes, with Jen singing and playing the xylophone, whose stellar, transcendent tones hang over the audience like the menace of the clerks' dreams and their revealed memories.
Director Donya Washington GS wisely steers away from making deliberate connections to current events (aside from a few side references to the Patriot Act). "We must have had lives," one of the clerks says at one point, alluding to what their pot-fueled apathy must have given way to when they resembled the suspects they are "tracking." "Cipher" blows cold where "Bruise Easy" blows hot, but the effect is no less powerful on an audience made taut with fear.
