"A Night of Quickies," all directed by Greg Smucker, comprises six works of varying length and quality. Things start on a high note with The Lesson, written by Melinda Lopez and performed with bite by Debra Wise. This short and understated monologue is about a carpenter who goes a little too far in proving that she can do anything a man can do, but better. Geralyn Horton's The 12:22 Brighton from London/Victoria, a rambling monologue recited by a drunk woman (Birgit Huppuch) on the London subway, is harder to fathom. A few people in the audience chuckled at some of the British references, but the rest of us were left in the dark.

Sheri Wilner tweaks Arthur Miller's great American play with Little Death of a Salesman, told from the point of view of Willy Loman's occasional mistress -- the one his son Biff discovers him with in a Boston hotel room. Debra Wise returns to shake her hips and shrug her shoulders in the lead role here, badgering a hotel clerk and refusing to believe that Willy won't show up for their regular tryst. "I use him like a kitten uses a scratching post," she brags at first. But Wise slowly adds tragic shadings to this forgotten "other woman" of classic American drama. "When it's cold out, everyone is cold," she explains in this bitterly funny play, which ends before we get tired of its conceit.

The same can be said of Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro's A Russian Tea Party, in which a little girl channels Chekhov and Dostoyevsky while playing with her dolls. She revels in her own depression and tells one of her tea-party "guests" that she had to get rid of her little brother: "I threw Boris out because he gave me no problems." Much of the comedy in Tea Party derives from the fact that a child actor (Eliza Rose Fichter, in an accomplished performance) says things like "Doesn't she know how much I hate her? The scum!" and "I feel sorry for others because they're not with me more often." But a darker approach to sibling rivalry sneaks into the play and saves it from cuteness.

M. Lynda Robinson's Men Are from Milwaukee, Women Are from Phoenix deserves credit for presenting one long, give-and-take scene between two characters -- a relief from the monologues and non-linear narratives so common in these kinds of festivals. But in this production, which feels rushed, the title turns out to be the best thing about the play. Doug Halsey and Kerry Dailey play a married couple who argue over a thinly disguised, and not terribly exaggerated, version of the best-selling book about Mars, Venus, and lack of communication between the sexes. The script shows some intelligence, but it's undermined by the sit-com style.

The "Quickies" program concludes, appropriately enough, with Lin Haire-Sargeant's Dead, about two sisters trapped in a snowstorm and hashing out the resentments between them. There's a twist straight out of The Twilight Zone that's revealed early and is not enough to sustain the rest of the play. Fortunately, Dead boasts the always watchable Margaret Ann Brady, who brings a touch of Fargo-type black comedy to her role.

Bay Windows

Into the next generation

by Gina Perille

February 2001
 

‘A Night of Quickies,’ presented as part of the 4th Annual Boston Women on Top Theater Festival, in the Black Box Theater, at the BCA, Boston, remaining performances March 10 and 11 at 10:30 pm, March 12 at 7 pm.
 

As in years past, one feature of the Boston Women on Top Theater Festival is a night of short plays. This year, there are six plays presented—two more than in 1999—by Centastage and Underground Railway Theater. The overall production is weaker than last year’s collection of extremely clever writings. This is due in most part to the fact that a couple of the offerings do not come across as plays; they come across merely as scenes.
 

The play that feels most like a scene is “Men Are from Milwaukee, Women Are from Phoenix” by M. Lynda Robinson. It features a young couple in a discussion that quickly turns into an argument about the ways—good and bad—each gender communicates. The third character in the scene, in a matter of speaking, is a relationship book that the woman is trying to share with the man. A very darling Kerry Dailey plays She to Doug Halsey’s He in this exchange filled with well-choreographed physical humor and well-timed eye rolling. The play (or scene) itself does not give the actors far to go, however, and feels very pat.
 

Another play in which sexism and gender issues are up for discussion is “The Lesson” by Melinda Lopez. Lopez’s play features Debra Wise as a seasoned and macho female carpenter who teaches a young boy a lesson after he comments that she pounds nails “like a girl.” Wise’s character, although larger than life, is not as fully drawn as it could be. And Wise herself looks a bit lost as to whom her audience should be. Her eyes roam through the theatre as she delivers her lines. In last year’s evening of short plays, Wise’s megacharacter in “It Doesn’t Take a Tornado” was given an invisible TV crew to speak to and it made all the difference.
 

Wise does better as a woman waiting for the return of her occasional lover in “The Little Death of a Salesman,” by Sheri Wilner. Wilner’s script is a bit of a challenge, but Wise and Doug Halsey, who plays a hotel clerk, create some interesting moments as they endow a man’s hat with the persona of Arthur Miller’s famous salesman, Willy Loman. Wilner’s convention resembles the approach Jean Rhys took toward the novel “Jane Eyre” when she wrote “Wide Sargasso Sea” from the perspective of the woman locked in the attic. In “The Little Death of a Salesman,” we see a contorted perspective of Willy Loman and witness the spiraling decay of a jilted woman.
 

Highlight of the evening
 

The highlight of the evening is Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro’s play “The Russian Tea Party,” which features fourth-grader Eliza Rose Fichter. For those who do not read the program notes carefully, she is the daughter of Debra Wise. Fine hereditary thespian blood notwithstanding, Fichter is mesmerizing as a young girl confined to her room for misbehavior who then dreams up even worse behavior while in confinement. Alfaro’s playwriting trick is placing adult words and phrases in the mouth of a pink taffeta-draped anti-angel who proceeds to bash doll faces together and choke teddy bears along the way. This play is disturbed, but entertaining enough to not be disturbing.
 

Of the two other plays on the evening’s program, “The 12:22 from Victoria/ Brighton” by Geralyn Horton is the hardest to digest. It contains two of the least appealing challenges for an actress: one, to be stinking drunk; and two, to be in a moving vehicle. Birgit Huppuch has the unenviable task of overcoming these challenges without much support from the design staff with regard to light changes or sound. The only time the audience hears the train is when the doors supposedly open, which is, usually, when a train is quietest.
 

Birgit Huppuch also appears in “Dead,” a truly creepy play by Lin Haire-Sargent that calls into question whether two sisters have died or if one is trying to drive the other to her death. A great plot is in Haire-Sargent’s work, but there is something belabored about the escalating intensity. Margaret Ann Brady plays the older sister in “Dead” and does so with a very natural air and delivery. Her rapid demise into confusion, coupled with flashes of unexpected anger, serve to root the play in its first seeming reality. Huppuch’s character is more questionable—both in intention and in delivery—and is easier to doubt.