Theatre--Review (ART at Theatre 810)

Acadiana Repertory Theatre has done something unusual by launching a New Works Festival. Various artists associated with ART will read the parts of characters from ten new plays, two on Friday, two on Saturday, and one on Sunday over two weekends. The plays are quite diverse, and the first weekend provided lively entertainment, though it’s always a little hard to gauge a play’s true potential without
seeing the blocking. Still, it’s fun to try. Thanks to an illness, I missed the Friday night performances but was able to catch Saturday’s and Sunday’s.

So far, Sunday’s entertainment is the clear winner. David Stallings’ Barrier Island had the sound of a compelling drama all too true about the Gulf Coast people and those who remain no matter what hurricane is barreling their way. It concerns Capadona’s Bar in Galveston, Texas, owned by Laura’s parents Margie and Charlie, but effectively rented to and run by Nate and Suzie, friends of the family one might say. Laura, who’s been gone for over a decade, has hastily returned with her son Daniel for two reasons: recent unemployment and her father Charlie has suffered a stroke. She returns home to discover the family’s finances in disarray, her mother Margie essentially is the throes of Alzheimer’s, and the house looks like a disaster area with opened food cans everywhere. The sturm and drang of the play comes in the second act, where the audience discovers that Laura’s family’s financial troubles are due to Nate and Suzie, who had stopped paying rent for the last year, citing financial pressures of sending their own children to expensive schooling. Even in the best of families such difficulties arise and the fighting is just as classic. There are no wasted characters in this gumbo, with a classmate of Laura’s named Trey Dobbs, to the bar regular named Bob, his daughter Cheryl and his granddaughter Stephanie, who’s taken a liking to a slow-witted patron
named Carl. There is a lull in Act one from about the thirty minute mark until the act ends at approximately one hour where the play tends to drag a little. The opening and almost all of Act two make the play well worth listening to, and a full staging of this play would certainly be interesting.

The other two productions on Saturday paled in comparison. Matthew Ivan Bennett penned the frank In the Open, focusing on two picked-on teenagers who exact revenge in the worst possible way. Set in Utah, in the heart of Mormonism, In the Open is a brooding, disturbing tale of Dustin and Jordan and the all-too-typical problems teenagers face in small town communities. Dustin’s mother, Chris—short for Christina,
I’m assuming—is in a dead-end job and finds solace both in her relationship with her co-worker, Valerie, supposedly a lesbian, and her soon-to-be-adopted Mormon faith, solidly shown through the works of a Mormon teacher Daniel, who happens to be Jordan’s father. That’s how Dustin and Jordan meet, through a prayer meeting between Chris and Daniel, but the pairing of the two boys leads to disaster. These friends exact lethal revenge on a racist teacher and his bully son, and though Dustin’s girlfriend of sorts, Stephanie, tries to stop the boys, she fails to prevent their attempt to intimidate their tormentors. Overall, the play had some thoroughly unbelievable dialogue between the teenagers, though the scenes involving Stephanie and Jordan had an appealing innocence. The actual teenager who attacks the bully is unexpected, something actually pleasant in theatre these days, but the final scene felt like a rushed and badly written attempt to tie up
loose ends. The final scene was anti-climactic and it slightly ruined what had been up to then a somewhat interesting production.

The least satisfying of the three productions was the play The Terrible Girls, a captivating title for a less-than-fulfilling play by Jacqueline Goldfinger. Perhaps the blocking adds to the production, but I found it difficult to warm up to the three protagonists, waitresses who work in a rural Southern bar in White Springs, Florida. One senses immediately that the three gals don’t necessarily get along, but they don’t leave either, something which becomes eminently clear as they are all linked by intrigue and murder. Minnie is the simple-minded and religious waitress, but Bertie is the somewhat sensible and more prudish character who’s offended by the salacious manner of Gretch, who goes after and picks up a deaf patron. In a scene of hilarity, Gretch is making out with the poor deaf fellow until she accidentally punches a hole in the dry wall and a skull comes rolling out. The audience is no longer in Kansas anymore as all three ladies prove that they have skeletons—literally—hiding everywhere. It’s Grand Guignol in the style of Hush… Hush… Sweet Charlotte, and the horror soon drenches everything in this production. The ending is rushed, little is explained as to who are these bodies or exactly how many there might be, how they get away with it all, and who actually did all the murdering. It’s a play that needs some work.

I’m looking forward to the second weekend of the New Works Festival, which is slated to include 100 Planes by Lila Rose Kaplan, and Human Capacity by Jennifer Barclay on Friday, Principal Principle by Joe Zarrow and A Place to Land by Chelsea Marcantel on Saturday, and A Home Across the Ocean by Acadiana native Cody Daigle on Sunday. Whichever play gets the most votes will become part of ART’s regular upcoming season, an intriguing way to select your plays. I look forward to seeing which play wins.
---Vincent P. Barras