Theater With Punch
Summer Shorts festival features strong programs and performances

BY Mary Damiano
Published: Jun 2008

Summer Shorts has been called short attention span theater, the Saturday Night Live of theater. It’s also the unofficial start of the theatrical summer season in South Florida and one of the most frenetically energetic events in town.

This year marks City Theatre’s 13th season of Summer Shorts, which contains 16 plays broken up into two programs labeled A and B. These are the most mainstream plays — more kid-friendly content and racier fare can be found respectively in two other shorts programs this month, Shorts 4 Kids and the late-night Undershorts — and emotion has been amped up. The funny plays are really over the top, while the serious plays are particularly hard-hitting. Unlike in past years, there are hardly any plays that lead to head-scratching, what-were-they-thinking moments.

Program A’s plays examine funny romantic attraction (In Paris, You Will Find Many Baguettes but Only One True Love and Tongue Tied), parental desperation and grief (Silence, Jody’s Mother and Rats) and fathers and sons (My Father’s Heart). In perhaps the two funniest plays, parents go to great lengths to secure spots in a private school for their 5-year-old daughter in Parent Interview; and local playwright Michael McKeever gives us a glimpse of what was going on backstage at Ford’s Theatre the night Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in Laura Keene Goes On.

Program B also has a wide range of subjects, including new fatherhood (It’s a Girl), sexual orientation (Sheepish), shattered relationships (Home and Fragment of a Paper Airplane) and the wacky world of TV writers (On Story). Perhaps the best piece here is A Little Chatter, a lovely play in which a Muslim mom and a Little League coach form an understanding in post-9/11 New York.

Summer Shorts always boasts a strong ensemble, but this year features several standout performances. Stephen Trovillion, who’s been part of the
Summer Shorts ensemble for 10 seasons, is even stronger than usual. Trovillion can do more with a raise of his eyebrow or a wry grin than most actors can with a page of dialogue, and his collection of characters — a grieving father, a frustrated dad, an erotica-reading husband, a TV writer and an openly gay sheep — allow him to do some serious morphing. Most of Elena Garcia’s characters allow her wackiness to come through — as an American tourist in France who falls in love with a mime, an admissions director with an unusual agenda, and a woman who expresses herself through sock puppets — and that provides a perfect counterbalance to her most down-to-earth character, the Muslim mother in A Little Chatter. Paul Tei, usually found behind the scenes as part of the directing ensemble, jumps into his portrayals with both feet, especially in an enigmatic speech about smoking in Fragments of a Paper Airplane and as Garcia’s sock-puppeted cast mate in Tongue Tied.

New artistic director Stuart Meltzer has left his mark on this year’s festival, and that’s a good thing. He’s shaken things up, assembling new faces in the cast, directors and designers. These choices, combined with plays that range from zany to heartbreaking, make for a very satisfying Summer Shorts.