Colonial Players has just completed its One-Act Festival, providing in two weekends what its producer called "a learning lab for aspiring directors."
The combination of nine plays produced by Beth Terranova was called "Fun and Mind Games," consisting of old and new comedies and dramas to please casual theater-goers. Different slates were offered on different evenings: Slate 1 featured six short plays and Slate 2 had three plays, including a 45-minute comedy, Civilization and Its Malcontents.
My schedule limited me to Slate 1, which was designed to stand alone to provide a full entertainment experience.
"One-acts are fun for both actors and audience - not a huge commitment, and lots of variety," said actress Sue Struve.
Slate 1 began with Anton Chekhov's The Dangers of Tobacco, a rambling monologue delivered by an unhappily married Ivan who does his wife's bidding and becomes increasingly unhappy as he describes his daily life. The timelessness of the great 19th century Russian writer's story of Ivan (here played by Joe Thompson and directed by Lia Boyle) elicited a respectable share of laughter from the large Friday evening audience.
Second on the program and clearly in the "mind game" category was Susan Glaspell's 1916 early feminist play, Trifles. Directed by Joan Hamilton, it featured a cast of five: a sheriff and his wife, the county attorney and a neighbor couple who gather at the empty home of a recently jailed woman accused of killing her husband. The men go about their work of finding "real evidence," belittling the women's concerns about the condition of Mrs. Wright's fruit preserves and her quilt stitching.
In nuanced performances Josie Dubois as the sheriff's wife, Mrs. Peters, and Theresa Olson as neighbor Mrs. Hale provide insight into the difficult lives of farm women.
After intermission, the program continued with another monologue, Neil LaBute's Love at Twenty, which debuted in 1997 and seemed light-years away from Chekhov. Here, a 19-year-old woman played by Elizabeth Seaman is a tough though na?ve and vulnerable college student involved with a 45-year-old married professor. The play, with its rapid-fire lines, is well-paced by director Lia Boyle.
Written at the end of World War I as a satirical, anti-war statement, British playwright Louise Bryant's The Game fascinated with its struggle between two women symbolizing Life and Death competing for the destiny of two characters, The Girl and Youth.
