Yesterday I caught the 2012 Culture*Park Short Plays Marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. I had the best ten hours. A few people from my playwriting group and a few friends were there, some of whose plays were being performed. My son met me toward the end of the marathon, seeing the kind of thing that has captured the old man’s fancy. Last night all was right with the universe.
As with anything, some plays had rough edges, but most were pretty good and quite entertaining — and some were excellent. As a beginning playwright, I learned a few things from several of them. Those that really connected with the audience’s emotions were those I paid particular attention to:
Bad Coffee by novelist, poet, director and playwright Pat Hegnauer depicts a novelist’s character haranguing her to promote the book and keep alive the world she has created. Hegnauer writes poetically, creating believable, moving and quite humorous dialogue. At the end, the writer’s character succeeds in keeping her world alive, something we of course have been rooting for all along. The takeaway for me was that powerful, moving language is often sufficient to carry a short play, especially if you really love your characters and don’t want to torture them too much.
Gin and Ashes by poet/playwright Kim Baker is the story of a daughter who has come to the hospital to obtain durable power of attorney for her terminally-ill mother and instead resolves a few mother-daughter issues. The characters are sparingly painted, yet we feel we know them. How does Baker do that? Playwrights can construct elaborate biographies for characters but, in the end, it’s the writing, not the detail, that makes them real and makes us love them.
How Kim Sa-Rang Got Her Name by Will Arbery is the story of a child who has been left to starve by negligent parents. Her desperate entreaties first appeal more to reason, then become more desperately emotional. Perhaps the writer’s artifice is easily-enough recognized, but it sure succeeds.
Wish by Kelly DuMar is the story of a woman who comes to a room in a convalescent home to visit a father who years ago raped her, leading to the birth of a child who then was taken from her. It compresses a life of pain into the thimble that is a ten minute play. The protagonist comes to confront her father, but all he can do is babble. The symbolism of her stealing his watch at the play’s beginning, then placing it back on his wrist at the end of the play, was just the right touch. The resolution is that, though she would like to steal back a lost life, she now accepts that she can never get back that time.
There were many more I loved, including a side-splitting, funny encounter between two drunken Bruins fans, a surprisingly poignant cooking lesson by a refugee, a tale from the Holocaust, a wonderful first play by a talented theater student, various studies of relationships, a wickedly funny, cynical piece on political campaigning, and several others. How great that New Bedford has Culture*Park!
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