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Reviews - The Boston Plays
Boston Phoenix
Centastage
fields `The Boston Plays'
by Robert
David Sullivan
October 2001
"THE BOSTON PLAYS," by Bill Lattanzi, Janet Kenney, Michael
Bettencourt, Ginger Lazarus, Joe Byers, and Dean O'Donnell. Directed
by Greg Smucker. Set design by Loann West. Lighting by Amy Lee.
Costumes by Bob Pagliarulo. Sound by Rick Brenner. With Chris Chew,
Mary Kearney, Joseph J. Pearlman, SerahRose Roth, and Joe Siriani.
Presented by Centastage at the Boston Center for the Arts, through
October 28.
One nice thing about a good short play is that it leaves you with
so much to talk about. The playwright usually avoids telling you too
little (so you don't get stuck on the question "What was that
about?"), and he or she avoids piling on so many revelations that
the characters disappear under the weight of them. Of the six works
in "The Boston Plays," all by local playwrights, none is obscure in
meaning, but a couple left me wanting to know less.
We begin with Bill Lattanzi's My Way, a five-minute sketch
about a young guy (Chris Chew) who pulls a Ralph Kramden on his
live-in girlfriend (SerahRose Roth). He proclaims that he's the king
of the castle and she better get used to it, but his nervous pacing
makes it clear that she's in complete control -- even when she says
nothing. This piece is certainly economical, and there's a kick in
watching Chew stomp around the stage and contradict everything
coming out of his mouth.
Janet Kenney's What Mother Knows opens with the title
character (Mary Kearney) sitting on a porch with a cocktail and
getting under the skin of her teenage daughter (Roth). "My varicose
veins are killing me," she says. "They're from child-birthing, you
know." To judge from her daughter's response, Mom has said this
plenty of times before. We learn that the daughter's sullenness is
related to her upcoming high-school prom, and specifically to
complications caused by Mom's behavior. Kearney and Roth are nicely
low-key in this vignette, and Kenney's script is deceptively simple.
As you watch the play, the mother is the center of attention; in
retrospect, the more intriguing question raised by What Mother
Knows is whether the daughter will go down the same path.
We move from family politics to social commentary with Michael
Bettencourt's Click, a Pinteresque tale (if you want to avoid
that adjective, don't name a character Pinto) about an act of
violence in a London park. A young man (Joseph J. Pearlman) brags to
his roommate (Chew), who is apparently also his lover, that he is
responsible for the crime described in the morning newspaper, and we
slowly learn the terrible details. The reversal of expectations in
Click is none too subtle, and any empathy with the characters
is washed away by the gratuitously peculiar language. The phrase
"daddies of sugar" sticks out in my mind, despite my best efforts to
forget it.
Ginger Lazarus's Arrhythmia brings us back to earth, with
a pillow-talk scene between a fussy doctor (Joe Siriani) and his
long-suffering mistress (Kearney). The woman tries to talk about the
mysteries of the heart, both as a source of life and as a metaphor
for love; the doctor keeps squelching her efforts with clinical
descriptions of the organ in question. There's food for thought
here, along with some enjoyably silly moments -- such as when the
doctor asks, "You want me to tell my wife about you? That would just
make her suspicious." But Siriani's character is a bit cartoonish,
making you wonder how any woman could put up with him.
The final play before intermission, Joe Byers's The Piney Boy,
is about a young couple (Chew, Roth) whose car has hit and killed a
wandering child in the woods. For most of the play, I viewed the
characters as ordinary people caught in a life-changing situation.
Roth is particularly good as the woman whose moral compass seems to
fly apart after she considers all the repercussions of her brief
disregard for the speed limit. ("I thought I knew you," her
boyfriend says in response to her cold-hearted solution. "You know
me now," she corrects him.) But toward the end of the play, Roth's
character matter-of-factly drops a few statements that are so
hateful, I concluded she was an awful person before the
accident -- which made me lose all interest in her plight.
The last and longest piece of the evening is Dean O'Donnell's
Legwork, which gives us the dirt on unethical bill collectors.
Walter McMillan (Siriani) uses blackmail and even threats of
violence to get deadbeats to pay up, and he proudly shares his
tricks with a young trainee (Pearlman). Shortly after setting up
this scene, O'Donnell offers a series of elaborate plot twists in
the tradition of Sleuth. However, the two characters were not
compelling enough to make me to care which one had the upper hand at
any given moment. Director Greg Smucker, who keeps the rest of the
evening moving along smoothly, seems to have run out of rehearsal
time before getting Legwork on its feet, and there were quite
a few muffed lines on opening night. "The Boston Plays" ends with an
unintentional reminder that shorter can be better.
The
Theater Mirror
The Boston Plays
by
Larry Stark
Published October 2000
If there is an emerging "Boston style" of
playwriting, it may be connected with the 10-minute play format. All
six of "The Boston Plays" that were developed through CentaStage's
Write On workshop series are short, succinct slices of two-person
interaction that imply rather than elaborate a wider world. And four
of them had an "out-of-town-tryout" production in a little backwater
town down south called New York City.
The simplest of these plays is Bill Latanzi's "My
Way" in which a lounging writer is surprised by the early return of
his much more orderly significant other. In response to her silent,
imperious glare he shouts he will from now on live by his own
relaxed, slovenly rules --- all the while contradicting every word
by rushing to clean up all his messes. Latanzi defines both
characters and their relationship in a swift explosion of action and
monologue without a wasted word. The whole hilarious play is over in
an eye-blink, giving the audience mind something still digested at
the final blackout.
Ginger Lazarus' "Arrhythmia" is also a simple
domestic disagreement --- this time between a no-nonsense doctor and
the more tenderly romantic mistress who sneaks in and out of his
home when the wife's away. The conflict is over whether "heart"
refers to a metaphor for love or merely a muscle one can hold in the
hand. Obviously, for both this is a word with serious overtones.
The pair in Janet Kenney's "What Mother Knows" is
mother and daughter, the discussion over the breakup with a
boyfriend so soon before a prom. Things have obviously come to a
head because dad is rarely around and mom has become a falling-down
secret alcoholic in denial. The tensions arise because neither one
really wants to talk, yet feels they must. Again, a lot of ground
gets covered with dropped hints and significant silences.
Michael Bettencourt has chosen a homosexual pair
in "Click" one of whom totally on impulse fought back and murdered a
fag-hater who jeered at him in the park after seeing him kiss a
friend on the mouth. The crime is recounted, but the fascination of
both men is at that "click" when impulse became action. Though it's
noticed in the newspaper their problem is not concealing what will
probably remain unsolved, but understanding all the emotions and
experiences that led up to that sudden, unexpected "click."
There is death in Joe Byers' "The Piney Boy" too
--- a child hit on a lonely road in the south Jersey pine-barrens by
a couple who were speeding and then ran out of gas. Both see it as a
disaster, the boy insisting he'll lie and say he was driving, the
girl insisting no one will know if they just leave him and go on
about their happy lives as if nothing had happened. Obviously,
though, these lives no matter how they decide can never possibly be
the same.
The last and longest play is Dean O'Donnell's
carefully constructed "Legwork" in which two men in a bank's
loan-collection department reveal the secrets of success in their
cut-throat lines of work. The younger seeks tips and advice, the
mentor preens and shows off. The "legwork" of the title refers to
scouting out the lives and habits of deadbeats in order to shame or
scare or blackmail them into paying up --- methods that are
unethical and probably illegal. But the play becomes a rolling duel
in which each man outsmarts the other with what he and the audience
has learned about each other. The play unfolds like a lush,
continually surprising flower.
Just as he had with the "Night of Quickies" at the
last Women On Top Festival, Director Greg Smucker proved a solid
ringmaster, using five actors to play the even dozen roles, and
letting Stage Manager Amy Pacheco, her crew and the actors do quick,
choreographed changes of Loann West's set-pieces. The crisp and
efficient technical support from Amy Lee's lights, Rick Brenner's
sound and Bob Pagliarulo's costumes, like the handling of the set,
let the playwrights' words and the actors hold centerstage.
The crew of actors switched characters and clothes
so swiftly they looked literally like new people, such as SerahRose
Roth's quick change from the silent wife in the first play into the
troubled, reticent teen-ager in the second, then the distraught and
terrified woman in the fourth ("The Piney Boy"). Mary Kearney went
from the almost immobile, softly and ineffectually helpful mother to
that romantic, unsatisfied doctor's mistress two plays later. Chris
Chew had to start with an explosion of self-righteousness for the
first play to the distraught "victim" of that Piney Boy's death, and
between them to the homosexual murderer talking about the crime with
Joseph J. Pearlman in the overheated "Click". And in the final play
Pearlman fought as the eager comer with the slyer and older Joe
Siriani, who had his doctor's cool insistence on fact rather than
emotion seriously shaken two plays before. Tour de force
performances all round.
These six short plays seemed like quick, emotional
snap-shots of people in the throes of momentary, shocking change.
The quality and the variety as well as the brevity probably has a
lot to do with the influence of CentaStage's Artistic Director Joe
Antoun, who for the past three years has shepherded them through the
Write On workshops. Developing plays from idea to final production
is partly a group-suggestion process, partly editing, and partly a
process of instilling in playwrights the confidence to listen to
constructive criticism and to keep working. In groups like
Playwrights' Theatre, Shadow Boxing, and Playwrights' Platform, and
in play fests like Boston Women on Top, Playwrights' Platform's
summer shows, the Summer Shorts at the Hovey Players, and April's
annual Boston Theatre Marathon, audiences are beginning to realize
that "The Boston Plays" are fast becoming a style, an artistic force
to be reckoned with.
It's about time.
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