plug: short and sweet

Tonight I went to Short + Sweet, which is a fantastic production of short (10 minute or less) plays.  The plays are new and written just for the production, and the top 100 (there's 10 weeks with 10 plays performed several times each week -- i.e., tonight there were 10 plays over a hour and a half or so -- they'll be performed the same way the rest of this week and next week 10 new plays will be done, etc., etc.) as well as some wildcards get voted on until winners are eventually picked.  And I have to say -- the competition is mighty fierce!

At intermission, after 5 plays, I was pretty sure I knew one I wanted to vote for (thankfully they give you two votes), but after intermission I could only narrow it down to 6.  Anyway, there was a lot of talent all around, but here's my quick (very biased) thoughts:

(spoiler alert if you're going!!)

1.  The Interview -- very poignant and well done.  Well cast, well acted.  I don't know that I'd say I liked it ("poignant" isn't usually my thing), but it struck me as very worthwhile and good.

2.  Six Naked Girls at a Nudist Beach -- fun, though a bit too self-aware.  More enjoyable yet less good than the one before it.

3.  One Day in the Life of Keef; The Human Riff -- didn't get it.  Potentially it was deep and meaningful and witty but it all went kind of over my head, thus rendering it difficult to appreciate.

4.  The Actor -- well done.  The script wasn't my favorite, but it was carried out well.  Particularly liked the little face big face exercise and other bizarre warm-ups I remembered from acting class.

5.  Sparkling Effluescene -- really liked this one.  It was funny and well played.  It really won my heart by naming the automated voice answering machine Laura -- reminded me so much of the Lara I know at ... well, if you've ever called customer service with Lara, you'll know which one I mean.  The humor -- "So you'd like the accounts department?" -- was the highlight for me.

6.  Six Sharp Words -- nice and normal.  Actually, come to think of it, except possibly for play #3, they were all reasonably normal, which was kind of nice.  Not that I can't take zany and off-the-wall, but sometimes it's refreshing to go to theatre that doesn't feel the need to try to reinvent itself every other play.

7.  Pretty Bird -- also really liked this one.  It was such an intriguing concept -- there was the husband, the wife and the bird, played by a pretty young thing with feathers.  The couple were trying to go through marital counseling with the aid of the bird, who was supposed to repeat back what they said so they felt heard and understood.  The bird, however, was very good at repeating what the husband said and very good at repeating only part of what the wife said.  "Pretty bird," though, was its favorite refrain.  A really cool concept.

8.  Hyacinth Court -- this was written (how cool is this?!) by a friend of a friend and was the whole reason we went to the show this night.  It was much more serious than many of the others and quite grim, but very well written (not just saying that!) and very well done.  It actually reminded me a lot of The Book Thief, both in terms of setting (albeit decades removed) and tone.  There were two actors on stage -- one, an old man who was said to have been a Nazi and was regarded as strange and scary by his neighbors -- and the other a 15-year-old neighbor girl who was scared of him, but also felt sorry for him.  They never actually interacted -- the spotlight shifted back and forth between them -- but they were speaking on similar topics back and forth.  He was lonely and she was thinking of visiting him -- but in the end she decided to put it off one more day (he was scary after all) and he killed himself out of grief that night.  It was very moving, with quite a lot of depth for a 10-minute play.

9.  Jane Austen Made Me Do It -- a funny romp poking fun at Jane Austen and her admirers.  The girl, in Austen-style garb, swooned her way through brief discussions of all six of Austen's books while the boy, who clearly liked her but she was oblivious to, entered these discussions taking the counterpoint.  Fun and witty.

10.  The Cause -- really good and really Australian.  Set in the Shire, it featured a stereotypical surfer and his peer (called in the program "Rohan -- a socially inept teenager brainwashed by popular culture") who clashed continually until finally Rohan overstepped the line and made a crack about the ocean (insulting the surfer's girlfriend, mother? and sister hadn't been over it, but the surf was) which led the surfer to call his friend "Gazza" (whom he'd spoken to at the beginning (nice full circle work to the writer there) and mentioned his friends, say, Shazza, Dazza, Lazza and Mohammed) and tell him to start the now-famous Cronulla riots.  I know friends have given me more information about these riots, but I can't remember off-hand -- basically, they were racially charged in Cronulla several years ago (90s maybe??) and I think their precise cause is unknown -- hence, this play which did a great job of showing that, yeah, they probably started over one stupid comment one teen made to another.  Leading up to that point, though, it was really funny and clever and well acted -- and I really liked that the script was actually really going somewhere, too.

Overall, a really fantastic night.  If you want to go, Short + Sweet is on Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8 pm and Sundays at 5:15 through March 4 at the Newtown Theatre on the corner of King and Bray Streets in Newtown.  $30/adults, $25/students.  Totally worth it!