Young Playwrights Festival - catch it while you can!

[InfiniteGirl]

Posted: 5/20/06 at 10:39am

I can schill, I'm a mom.

FROM THIS MORNING'S NY TIMES:

The 24th Annual Young Playwrights Festival at Peter Jay Sharp Theater

By ANDREA STEVENS
Published: May 20, 2006

Until and unless it dies, theater will always be a place where, on a good night, a society can see itself, fears and obsessions made flesh, the future glimpsed in the dark. When the plays are by teenagers, probably all the more so.

That is the case now at the Young Playwrights Festival XXIV, which opened on Wednesday at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater with a program of three one-acts. They were chosen from more than 1,000 entries in this national playwriting competition for writers 18 or younger founded by Stephen Sondheim in 1981 to encourage new works for the theater. Well-known dramatists whose early writings were selected include Rebecca Gilman and Kenneth Lonergan. This year the winners are young women who were 18 when their plays were submitted. All three have a lot to say, some of it funny, poignant, brutal and at times confusing — like life.

Interestingly, for these times, two of the plays involve religion, in one case pitting science against the Bible. Incest, alcoholism and attempted suicide are also in the spotlight. The first two plays are naturalistic, while the third is more a collage of scenes and video projections. The performances — all by Equity members — and direction are as professional as in many Off Broadway productions, and two of the actors are quite wonderful.

Those performances come in the evening's first and second plays, "Los Angeles Lullaby" by Kit Steinkellner and "Suicide Club" by Miriam Eichenbaum, both directed by Valentina Fratti.

Ms. Steinkellner's story is simple on the surface but full of emotional undercurrents for her three characters: a lonely young woman, Sonia (played by Laura Breckenridge), who has had a baby out of wedlock; her estranged, alcoholic father, Abbott (Mike Hartman), whom she summons in desperation; and a teenage neighbor, Chaz (James Miles), who wants them to become a substitute family, since his own has disintegrated.

A confrontational 15-year-old, Chaz sometimes sounds like a sitcom character, but Mr. Miles, a wide-eyed comedian with perfect timing, makes him thoroughly believable. Mr. Hartman's Abbott, all smoky cigarette voice and crouched body language, is also excellent as a onetime writer who has lost his touch but can sing a crying infant to sleep with a Gershwin tune. Ms. Steinkellner doesn't shy away from ugly family fights; there is real pain between Sonia and Abbott. But she knows when to use humor to offset the sting.

The three actors also appear in "Suicide Club," set mainly in a Roman Catholic high school. In this combination of satire and drama, Ms. Eichenbaum explores how to find something to believe in in a corrupt society, where evil can exist unpunished, and blind faith appears impotent.

Here, Ms. Breckenridge plays Brigitte, the class valedictorian, who flirts with suicide, while Mr. Hartman portrays a priest, and Mr. Miles a potential boyfriend for the brainy but confused Brigitte.

To avoid being expelled before graduation, two other students, the sexually promiscuous Mary (Janine Barris) and the three-time would-be suicide Lucy (Nathalie Nicole Paulding), along with Brigitte, psychoanalyze one another and complete their own tough-love cure in an unbelievable few weeks.

No matter. Ms. Eichenbaum has made her point, "how sometimes help comes," as she puts it in an interview in the program, "from the most unexpected places, and how young people can sometimes help each other more than anyone could ever imagine."

They do and they don't in Deborah Yarchun's "FreezeFrame," an ambitious if somewhat opaque play with disconnected scenes involving troubled college students. Directed by Richard Caliban, it could have used a more delineated set for clarity. Paul (Teddy Eck) and Mark (Jedadiah Schultz) are dorm mates who may represent the failed gods of religion and science. Paul, a photographer, sleeps with the Bible under his pillow. Mark insists that the Earth's poles are fatally reversing; in other words, the world may be about to crash like a computer.

Ms. Barris portrays Brianna, Paul's naïve girlfriend, while Ms. Paulding is Aliyah, a mysterious, icy temptress with blue hair who wants to control him. On the larger scale that Ms. Yarchun develops, neither religion nor science can apparently fix the world, which is racing toward "out of order." Not a happy ending, but a warning to keep in mind.

This year's series is dedicated to the memory of Wendy Wasserstein, a supporter of young playwrights and a longtime festival board member, who died in January.

The Young Playwrights Festival XXIV continues through next Saturday at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 416 West 42nd Street, Clinton; [phone].