By Brian Pope
Even with their short run times, the plays that make up Program C of the 2019 Pittsburgh New Works Festival don’t pull any dramatic punches. Whether they’re revealing closely guarded secrets, reliving past trauma, or hilariously contemplating their tragic fates, the characters in these shows are put through the ringer. For better and worse, the experience is similar for the audience.
First up is Joe Breen’s The Island produced by CCAC South Campus Theatre. A sunbathing Janet (Mairead A. Roddy) is startled when Oliver (Anthony Marino, Jr.) enters the scene. Both are at summer camps separated by a river that Janet has swam across for some peace and quiet. Their interaction ends with an uneasy silence, but you don’t get the sense that either of them have reached any sense of inner peace.
Both Roddy and Marino give their all to fleshing out their characters and establishing the odd couple dynamic between them. Beneath the surface of Janet’s bubbly personality is a profound sense of insecurity. Repressed, shy Oliver expresses himself through the portraits he sketches. It’s when Janet begins to thumb through the notebook he has filled with them that the secrets really start to pour out. I won’t reveal what the characters revealed about themselves, but experiencing those reveals in real time in the show won’t move any needle very much.
The same can be said of Breen’s script in general and of Lora Oxenreiter’s direction of it. You get the sense that they feel that the moments Janet and Oliver share are monumental, but the fact that they both let their guards down so quickly and emphatically feels contrived. With a shallow arc for both and minimal stakes, you feel just as empty as they do by the end.
True crime has taken the podcast and prestige television worlds by storm. With #NotMeAnymore, writer Garry Kluger, producer Duquesne University Red Masquers, and director Elysse Dalzell bring the hot genre to the stage. Bailey Rogers (Kristina Streno) may not be at the center of a real life, high profile trial, but her crime and incidents that led to it are all too familiar.
That holds true for Lydia Fulton (Cynthia Dallas), the lawyer who visits Bailey in prison at the top of the play to hear her side of the story and begin mounting a legal defense. Bailey (often rather argumentatively) testifies to the fact that she was a victim of abuse at the hands of her boyfriend. When she murdered him, she maintains that she was defending herself.
Ultimately, #NotMeAnymore reveals itself to be a mystery. Unfortunately, rather than raising the stakes of and leaving clues for the mystery, Kluger pulls the rug from beneath the audience with an unresolved twist ending. As with the writing, the performances by Streno and Dallas play it completely straight until the bombshell revelation comes out of nowhere. Streno is suitably snarky and Dallas is serviceably stern, but Dalzell’s static physical and emotional direction only does justice to Kluger’s flimsy script.
Oedipus, but Better (produced by The Heritage Players) could have had a variety of buttons on its title to describe Brian Scanlan’s streamlined, yet overstuffed adaptation of Sophocles’s classic play. …but Funnier, …but #Woke, …but Meta-er would all be more accurate adjectives in my opinion. Better is in the eye of the beholder and this eye sees this version of the story as more derivative than anything else.
On a scale from 1 to Game of Thrones, the tragic fate of Oedipus the King doesn’t even register as a spoiler anymore. This is a fact that the show immediately plays for laughs as Julie Elizabeth Beroes enters introducing herself as the director/chorus of the show-within-the-show along with her fellow actors Lawrence Karl, Elena Falgione, Matt Solter, and Katie Kerr Springer. The play sets them not only in our world and time but actually in the 2019 Pittsburgh New Works Festival where they vie for awards at the organization’s annual gala, lament the limited resources and time afforded to their slot, and make continued direct reference to Lawrence’s “parents” in the audience.
Similar to the way that Mel Brooks or Monty Python might handle Greek tragedy, Scanlan’s script and Nicole Zalak’s direction drag us through the familiar plot points of Oedipus by way of hijinx. Thanks to their great senses of physical and musical comedy, Solter and Falgione get the most laughs in their performances as the Tiresias and the Sphinx, respectively. For the most part, Karl as Oedipus and Kerr as Jocasta are left to do the dramatic heavy lifting when the play strangely shifts tone in its last third.
The script undercuts itself further with the addition of a climactic and, by its end, laughable-in-all-the-wrong-ways suicide scene for Jocasta. It’s the second of the show’s painfully on-the-nose efforts to give Oedipus a feminist revision. The first sees the female characters give a lengthy description and improvised demonstration of the Bechdel Test. Adaptation is instrumental in keeping the classics relevant, but when that adaptation is forced and lacks nuance, neither the original nor the update can truly shine.
The 29th annual Pittsburgh New Works Festival runs through September 29 at the Genesius Theater at Duquesne University. For tickets and more information for all the plays being featured this year, click here.
Categories: Archived Reviews