The Boston Theater Marathon Review

The Doppler of My Heart by Rick Park, Directed by Josh Glenn-Kayden, Presented by Company One Seven plays in and we have, by my reckoning, the first truly great ten minute play. It stars Greg Maraio and Becca Lewis (making a welcome return from the one minute readings of the previous day) as a married couple, Donnie and Eileen, who are taking a drive up to Connecticut. Their accents are thick and Boston. There’s amusing talk of checking “dopplah” “weathah”, as if she’d known it’d be this cold she’d have worn her “parkah” (… guess I probably don’t need the extra “h” on that word). There’s this delightful “Who’s on First”-type exchange as Eileen is complains about missing her friend’s nephew in a school production of Wicked. (he's playing Glinda and wants to perform on Broadway. "Yeah," quips Donnie, "Broadway in Somerville") “It’s Wicked?” he asks. “Yeah!” “Wicked what?” It’s hard to describe what made the play so effective. A huge acknowle...

Quick note: They usually sell copies of a bound printed collection of all the plays, and I was planning on purchasing a copy this year to help jog my memory and so I could make note of great lines, etc. Sadly, according to the lady at the counter, they’re still working out where they’re going to get the books printed and so they were not available. So I shall be relying exclusively on my chicken scratch notes written in a dark theater. May God help us all. Grass Hog by William Donnelly, directed by Christopher Scully, presented by Battleground State A man named Levesque (Michael Kaye) walks out on the empty stage, active lawn trimmer in tow (seriously, it was plugged in by a long extension chord), minding his own business when another guy named Bettencourt (Kevin LaVelle) crosses, yelling at him to stop. The grass he’s about to cut abuts the property line and while he may like his own grass trim and tidy, this guy prefers his yard less manicured. Actually, the grass itself bel...

Holy cow. Ten straight hours of theater. I did. I sat through every single play. I have twenty-seven solid pages of notes, half a page for each play: all fifty-four of them. Here are some things that I learned: Boston has some a-m-a-z-i-n-g actors. While I definitely saw familiar faces and friends, they were few and far between. Instead I was delighted by performer after performer after performer I had never seen before do some great great work. Watching it all had some terrifying implications for myself as an actor. Granted I know more than a few of them were equity, and that’s not happening any time soon for yours truly, but STILL. Wowza. This town’s also got some amazing playwrights. There were many great, and I’m talking GREAT plays. Plays I would be thrilled to see performed again. Obviously much credit has to be given to the actors and director, but the plays were legitimately surprising and subtle and poignant and laugh out loud funny. I can’t think of the last play I s...

Eugene Vigner, played by a significantly less bald Pat Shea So I know that my last two reviews were not exactly glowing, but that’s about to change with Constance Cogden’s One Day Earlier . Now before I continue: a brief caveat. I know Connie. A little over a decade ago I starred in a production of her (then) new adaptation of Moliere’s The Misanthrope at Amherst College. I had recently dropped out of school but was sort of lingering around Western Massachusetts like a benign tumor. And since all I seemed capable of doing was acting in college theater, I auditioned for the show and was cast. I fear that her very clever adaptation deserved a better production than the one afforded it, but to be fair that’s how I wound up meeting Olivia D’Ambrosio , now famed Artistic Director of Bridge Rep. I’m not trying to name drop, just trying to be transparent regarding my allegiances. However, even if I’d never known Connie, I’d already be biased towards this play. One Day Earlier is a...

The last play I reviewed I had very mixed feelings about. Judith by Julian Olf I’m much more of one mind: I didn’t like it. There are a variety of reasons for this, which I’ll get into, but first: a rundown. Judith is an adaptation of the Book of Judith, a Deuterocanonical book considered part of the Christian canon for Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christian sects, but not considered scripture by either Jews or Protestants. Growing up Lutheran myself, I had never heard this story until yesterday afternoon. Though frankly, even if it had been part of the Old Testament I’d grown up with, I’d still probably know nothing. My ignorance on matters biblical could fill an ark. The story is pretty simple: Judith (a luminous Marya Lowery) is an exceptionally pious Jew who has spent the past few years in mourning for her dead husband. In the meantime, the Persian army led by a general by the name of Holofernes is set to lay waste to the city of Israelites. He’s already cut off ...

No, not THAT Romeo! Oh man, do I have some complicated feelings about this play. Written by Barbara Blumenthal-Ehrlich and directed by Brett Marks (full disclosure: I am friends with Brett (but then, who isn’t? This guy gets around!)), Romeo Chang opens on a pair of bickering nurses trying to run simultaneous tests on a patient, Jen (played by the very strong Jessica Webb). One nurse is trying to do an ultra-sound and the other is trying to do another complicated procedure to see whether or not Jen can withstand an experimental procedure for what we soon discover is a terminal illness (I never caught a specific reference to the disease itself, though it’s possible I missed it in the early first scene as I was simply trying to figure out what was going on. My guess: lung cancer). The play smartly leaps past the moral quandary of whether or not she should take treatment to save her own life at the cost of her unborn baby. The outlook is already grim and the odds on the last trea...

If Ten Minute plays require a mastery of the succinct, then what pray tell demands the craft of the One Minute play? Boston already has its own One Minute Play festival, which I had the privilege of being in this past January (along with 65 other local actors). And both witnessing the over hundred one minute plays of that production and again seeing thirty today, my mind reels at the sheer variety so many authors manage to pack into such a small little package. I mean, after all, you barely have enough time to establish a sketch of a character or a situation, let alone allow them to develop. Some of the plays hinged on setting up a situation and then subverting out expectations with a twist ending, making the plays essentially a one minute joke. I have to admit, that I found the ones that did this today less appealing. Marika Barnett’s Lost and Found had a woman trying to convince an airline customer service representative to help her find her missing luggage. She eventually r...