City Theatre's Summer Shorts program offers 16 quick plays

BY CHRISTINE DOLEN
cdolen@MiamiHerald.com

South Florida's seasons being rather subtle things, events become the markers of change here. And one way we know for certain summer has arrived? It's time for City Theatre's annual Summer Shorts Festival.

In has been 11 years since director Stephanie Norman, playwright Susan Westfall and actress Elena Wohl decided that an annual festival of short plays would be a great thing for theater professionals-turned-moms to do. During those years, City Theatre has produced 195 bite-sized plays, comedies and musicals -- more than a third of them world premieres -- from more than 6,000 or so scripts submitted to it.

It has partnered with Actors Theatre of Louisville in culling the short-form scripts sent to Actors' annual Ten-Minute Play Contest, and this year's 16-play Summer Shorts lineup will include two of the three plays presented during the high-profile Humana Festival.

Next summer, the Miami-Dade portion of the festival moves into the 200-seat Studio Theater space at the new Miami Performing Arts Center. But the change of venue notwithstanding, Norman (the only founder still active in running the festival, Westfall serves on its board) isn't about to mess with the format of an arts event so many South Floridians have come to love.

In this year's festival, which runs through July 2 at the University of Miami's Ring Theatre and July 6-9 at the Broward Center's Amaturo Theater, the plays are clustered, as always, into two separate eight-show programs. Seven directors are staging the different shows and nine actors (some Summer Shorts veterans, some newcomers) get to flaunt their versatility in a variety of roles.

Still, Norman said, one key thing is different this year.

''We wanted to get the best actors, so we put together our acting ensemble first, then chose the plays,'' she said. ``It feels good to know we've got a really deep bench. And with the quantity and quality of the scripts coming in from Louisville, we could have done a Program A, B, C, D and E.''

Norman's ''deep bench'' consists of Summer Shorts veterans Elizabeth Dimon, Stephen Trovillion, Kim Ostrenko, Kameshia Duncan and Antonio Amadeo; actors Gregg Weiner, Joe Kimble and Ivonne Azurdia, all of whom are members of Miami's edgy Mad Cat Theatre Company; and veteran South Florida actor Ken Clement who, like Azurdia, is a Shorts newcomer.

Each will play multiple roles in this year's array of pieces, which director James Randolph (a veteran of past Summer Shorts acting companies) describes as plays about ``relationships, political issues, hot-bed topics, comedies, wacky pieces and plays with pathos.''

The quick changes require more than just a switch of costume (or, in the case of a trio of actresses in Adam Bock's Three Guys and a Brenda, the addition of facial hair). Though everyone doing Summer Shorts is a pro, putting all the pieces together can be, well, daunting. Amadeo likens rehearsals to ``boot camp.''

''The madness begins,'' said Duncan during the festival's frenetic technical rehearsals. 'You think, `Are we really going to get out of our costumes quickly enough?' ''

''It's not for everybody, which is not to say oh, darling, only I could do it. [It's] like presenting a different face to different people at work. You just have to do it faster,'' said Dimon, rehearsing for her fifth Summer Shorts stint.

``It requires different styles of acting. Then, each director has a different style, so you have to change your spots with each one. But you have to be true to yourself. Otherwise, you get very confused.''

For the audience, though, Summer Shorts offers the chance to delve into vastly different worlds, styles and experiences, one after another. Actor Kimble calls it ''short-attention-span theater.'' Clement likens the festival to ''Saturday Night Live or sketch comedy, but with more depth.'' And even if a particular show isn't to your taste -- or strikes you as downright loathsome -- the pain is fleeting.

''If you don't like something, something else comes along in 10 minutes,'' said Margaret Ledford, one of this year's directors. ``But [the actors and director] can make it full without it being an hour-and-a-half long. It's like dating in high school; it's just fun. It's amazing what you can get to in 10 minutes.''

Director Stuart Meltzer has staged three of this year's plays, including the world premiere of Aoise Stratford's The Closet, which closes Program B. The play features characters named Bernard (who looks very much like a certain purple dinosaur), Bart Sponge (resembling a squarish cartoon sponge) and Twinkles (who's a lot like a kids' show character maligned by homophobes). Clement, who plays Bernard, calls them ``the forgotten, slandered toys.''

Making that play work, Meltzer said, presented both physical and thematic challenges.

''The characters are larger than life, and the costumes are too, so the blocking was hard,'' he said. ``It's also very important that the characters remain toys, and not what some in the media say they are.''

Kicking off Program A and this year's festival is Sovereignty, a searing political allegory by Rolin Jones. Jones, a young playwright whose The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow won him an Obie Award and was a Pulitzer finalist this year (''I was eating cookies and laughing my ass off when I found out,'' he recalled), considers America's indifference to the horrors of the world in Sovereignty.

''I wrote my angry little play in a night,'' said Jones, who has an ongoing gig as one of the writers on the Showtime series Weeds. ``I'm pointing the finger at myself as much as anyone. We live in a privileged nation, and we're bitching about paying $3.50 a gallon at the gas station.''

Paul Tei, an actor, playwright and the founder of Mad Cat, is directing Sovereignty, which got major buzz at the Humana Festival. Tei is bringing his own vision to the script, infusing his production with ''elements of David Lynch and The Stepford Wives,'' with ''surrealism, like a Dali painting.'' He's also staging New Texas: Or Now That War Is Finally Over, Party On! by Joshua Peskay and Joshua James. It's a political play that combines humor and button-pushing, its characters called Dubya, Dick, Rummy and Delay. James is also represented by Diplomacy in this year's festival (Trovillion, who stars in Diplomacy with Clement, says it's 'like Abbott and Costello doing their `who's on first' routine''). The playwright said of New Texas, ``It gives me no small pleasure that it's being performed in Jeb Bush's backyard.''

Clement, who plays Dick in New Texas, has pushed his portraiture into satire.

''[Dick] Cheney mumbles, and that doesn't work onstage,'' he said. ``My Cheney is Burgess Meredith as the Penguin on the Batman TV series.''

Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.