Young UMD
Playwrights Explore Rocky Landscape of Emotions in Fractured Love
Lawrance Bernabo, Duluth News Tribune
November
20, 2014
Fractured
Love, the title given to the collection of original short works that opened
Thursday night at the Dudley Experimental Theatre, is something of a misnomer.
That is because more often than not the point where the particular love on
display was fractured is in the rear-view mirror and fading fast. Ultimately,
the unifying factor here is not the theme of the works, but rather the efforts
of the young playwrights grappling with their craft.
A company of eight
student actors performed a series of what were advertised as 10-minute plays by
UMD students and alumni, all directed by senior Joe Cramer. It turned out the
evening’s roster consisted of eight dialogues and five brief monologues. True, Aeschylus
never needed more than two actors on stage and everybody remembers him, but it
was a tad odd that nobody got to at least a third on-stage character.
The arrangement of the
pieces worked well. The evening began with the funniest piece, and ended with
the most touching moment. The opening piece by Bailey Boots was titled John, basically because there was one on
either side of a locked bathroom door (although neither has a line). A lot of
the humor in the piece came from Kyliah Thompson’s facial expressions, which
included some good old fashion mugging, as Kelly, who is horrified to discover
an engagement ring on her finger.
The Third Date by Jared Walz finds James (Jacob Fazzio) waking up tied to a
chair by Anna (Anna Gwaltney), and then things start getting weird. Alex
Goebel’s Mine has Olivia Blake’s
bartender trying to get the drunken Courtney (Gwaltney) out of the bar so she
can close up and go home. In Elephant in
the Car by Joshua Stenvick, a couple have run out of gas in a blizzard and find
their relationship is in a similar state.
Things turned decidedly
more serious after intermission. Erik Meixelsperger’s Fish Bowl has Thomas Matthes and Cassie Liebercowski as grieving
parents about to bury a child after an unspecified tragedy that has clearly
gone viral. This one explores an aspect of enabling that we have never really
seen in these all-too-frequent stories. However, the drama took a turn toward
humor; it was not that the moment rang false as much as it seemed to come too
soon in a piece this short. I would like to see how better Meixelsperger could
pull this off if this piece was lengthened to at least a one act.
All Fun and Games by Wesley Erickson starts during the final moves of a brutal
game of Candyland being played by two teenage boys (Ryan Cooper and Ryan
Richardson) that serves as an impetus for long simmering issues to come to a
head. Russell Habermann’s Burning Eden
is about a pair of siblings conflicted over putting their mother in a nursing
home. This was the one piece where I thought the performances could have gotten
a lot more out of the material, but both roles were done with a narrow range of
vocal shadings and pitched rather low.
The last piece, Waltzing with Eli by Carla Weideman,
offered another pair of siblings meeting on a park bench, with the sister
discovering the title character is off of his meds. Cooper’s performance as Eli
did a nice job of avoiding caricature with such a character, and created a
rather moving moment in less than ten minutes that served as a fitting note on
which to end the evening.
It there was a recurring
tendency in these pieces it was to go for comedy rather than drama, and by this
I do not mean simply that they were going to laughs, but that over the dramatic
construction of going from A to B to C, they like to go from A to 6. However,
it should be noted that very few of the situations presented, whether dramatic
or comedic, were commonplace ones readily within the life experiences of most
college students. So there is something to be said for going outside the usual
stricture of “writing what you know.”
As the monologues, Cassie
Liebercowsk’s Wrists Are Sexy was the
one that best provided a glimpse at a character whose past and future I was
instantly interested in finding out more about. But as for her Baby Killer piece, my immediate reaction
was that if you are going to go there, then you have to come up with something
more than this.
I heard a film director
say today that a monologue means either the other person has stopped listening
or you are talking too fast. Harold Remarc’s Taped Glasses, about the ironies of incompatible nerd love, was the
piece where I most wanted to meet the unseen listener. There might be something
more than a “Big Bang Theory” episode here that could be explored further.
Stenvick’s Until Tomorrow created a nice little
moment that I thought was a fitting endnote, but it turned out that was only
the halfway point and the real ending ended up paling in comparison. He’ll Get It Eventually by Susan Lynn
offers a quick glimpse at a quirky character, again making me curious as to
what more might be out there.
Such short pieces are
clearly unconventional drama. Self-contained and consisting of a beginning,
middle, and end, while at the same time suggesting more to the characters and
their conflicts outside of the limited time limit. With most of these dialogues
there was a point where you could see where it was that they needed to go,
while with the monologues you were usually left wondering where they could have
gone next. Within all of these works there are such … possibilities.
