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New American Theatre Festival of New One Act Plays 2015
Reviewed by Bill Raden
Asylum Theatre
Through March 8
At a time when the one-act play has become nearly extinct on Los Angeles stages, Jack Stehlin’s New American Theatre company commendably soldiers on with its what it calls its “Festival of New One Act Plays.”
For any company, such evenings serve as more than an opportunity for its actors to strut their stuff in featured roles. They are implicit curatorial statements of artistic intent that in one production provide a snapshot of a company’s ethos and the breadth of its literary ambitions.
In that sense, NAT’s one-act composite portrait for 2015 can be summed up as rich in acting chops that are mostly squandered on middling writing woefully short on engagement or genuine surprise.
Andrew Heinz’s satire “The FQ,” about a pay-cable scriptwriting team bickering over network demands that their heartfelt drama be loaded up with F-word expletives to better reflect “real life,” commits the unpardonable sin of revealing far too much that is far too familiar far too soon. Otherwise, both Robert Cicchini as the partner willing to sell the store for a shot at cable success, and Francesca Ferrara, as the pair’s stubbornly resistant artistic conscience, dance a deft two-step as each attempts to emotionally manipulate the other into submission.
Actor-playwright Joe Bays’ O. Henry-ish “The Perfect Wedding” tells the sentimental story about a father (Bays) in the final stages of cancer preparing to give away his daughter (played affectingly by Carly Waldman) on the day of her wedding. Bays is nicely restrained as a man grappling with the realization that the wedding day — for which he has been clinging to life — will ironically also spell his death. (Rebecca Hayes lends capable support as his unflappable wife.) Unfortunately, when Bays springs his climactic twist, instead of emotional clarity, the writing veers off into a confused thicket of the sentimental and the improbable.
“The Loose Ends” is playwright Mark Harvey Levine’s existential twist on the theme of opposites attract. Brendan Gill is Adam, the younger life partner of Joseph (a solid Joseph Gilbert). The two men, who appear to be in the midst of a break-up, divide their CD collection in what becomes an inventory of their fundamentally incompatible, generationally divided tastes and temperaments. It is only with the arrival of Adam’s mother (a nuanced Jeannine Wisnosky Stehlin) and the play’s sudden shift in perspective that Levine’s true aims get revealed as a wistful meditation on loss, grief and the healing affirmation of love.
Tyler Richard Hewes’ “Loss, or the Art of Stuffed Animal Husbandry” clocks in as perhaps the evening’s most exasperating example of missed opportunity. The first half of the piece has Vanessa Waters and Patrick Vest as an aging married couple enacting a bizarrely hilarious and expertly performed vaudeville centered on a large, white stuffed teddy bear. The game is quickly revealed as the couple’s elaborately — and increasingly twisted — invented existence of an imaginary child. But just as the piece takes hold as a riveting portrait of would-be parents grotesquely unfit for parenting, Hewes abruptly pulls the plug on its absurdities in a pointlessly sentimental and laugh-deflating stab at redemption.
“Exigence,” actor-playwright Brendan Brandt’s taut rumination on the boundaries between friendship, loyalty and compassion, emerges as perhaps the strongest and most thoughtfully sustained writing of the festival. Enlivened by the tensions created by Brandt’s coiled energy and underlying anger, and Jordan Lund’s contrasting transcendental calm, the play takes its time balancing its quiet sense of mystery with a deepening portrait of the affection and intimacy between a teacher-mentor and a favored student that will soon be put to the ultimate test.
The program closes with “Fighting Mr. Right,” Barbara Lindsay’s decidedly off-kilter if somewhat brittle first date comedy that boasts appealing performances from Jeff Kongs and Kate Parkin — the former as an increasingly frustrated suitor determined not to end his date sexually empty-handed. And while Parkin is persuasive as a flighty oddball equally determined not to put out until Kongs has satisfied her outlandish test of his long-term intentions, the elements never quite cohere. There is a sense that, in this instance at least, the fault may lie with director Jack Stehlin’s casting. (Stehlin stages the entire evening with measured economy). Kongs is simply too physically attractive to convincingly establish the comic urgency that would compel his character to overlook the klaxon-like warnings sounded by Parkin’s eccentricity.
New American Theatre at the Asylum Theatre, 6320 Santa Monica Blvd., Hlywd; Sun., 3 p.m.; through March 8. Newamericantheatre.com.
