Summer Shorts: Long on Entertainment
Festival boasts gay sheep, sock puppets, and the French

BY Penn Bullock
Published: Jun 2008

Paul Tei pulls off a coup de theatre in this year’s Summer Shorts Festival with a monologue about Kool cigarettes. In Fragment of a Paper Airplane, by Carlos Murillo, he plays a man brooding in his kitchen. Perhaps his only accomplishment of the year was to give up smoking. He had been hooked on Kool cigarettes, which he digested in chains while staring at the kitchen wall. One morning, he woke up to find the desire for his morning cigarette slipping away. To hasten it on, he threw out his lighter, ashtray, and his pack of Kools, vowed never to smoke again, and bought a new pack at his corner store. For a year, he kept the full pack of Kools in his knife drawer. Tei tells us how he would take it out, play with it intimately, and let it test his desire. It was, for him, an emblem of his self-mastery. On the day we join him in the kitchen, he gets a call from an estranged friend—an angry man, also in his kitchen, who became a Holocaust denier in middle age. The friend is calling with news that a long-lost mutual friend of theirs, a mysterious playwright on a 17-year writing sojourn, has perished in a New Mexican flash flood. The two men bellow at each other, they come to a steaming boil and they hang up. And then he pulls out the pack of Kools and smokes through it. Tei does a perfect enactment of that unique moment after the first puff, the fulfillment of a whole year of desire, the end of an itch.

This year’s Summer Shorts Festival at the Arsht Center is one of the biggest of its kind. The festival has run for 13 years, but this year City Theatre has added a program for kids (Shorts 4 Kids) and also a program for adults (Undershorts) featuring sex, most notably with a ventriloquist’s puppet, and other things deemed obscene. The creation of Undershorts is a total mystery, given that Summer Shorts’ mainstream program, Signature Shorts, sports full-frontal male nudity, lots of swear words, sex sounds from backstage, and myriad other crudities. In one of the funniest shorts, Justin Warner’s Parent Interview, we join a couple as they bay to a Montessori director, played with Stalinist aplomb by Elena Garcia. After putting them through torturous mind games, she lays down her final precondition for their bright daughter’s admittance into this prestigious preschool. Like any professional harridan, she’s sperm-starved. Thus, she requires the husband’s semen for progeny. For the sake of his daughter’s education, and with the ultimately enthusiastic permission of his wife, the husband delivers the sperm via coitus.

Signature Shorts presents 16 short plays, culled from more than a thousand submissions. The plays are divided between two programs, A and B, and feature the best actors in South Florida. Stephanie Norman, its executive director, boasts that the event is now wide-scale enough to represent a cross-section of contemporary American theater in short plays. If Summer Shorts affords us a peek, via the stage, into the American psyche, then we can see that Americans are lately concerned with family tragedies, pedophilia, gay sheep, post-9/11 reconciliation, and especially the French. This is a rough psychoanalysis of the collective mind, but these are all prominent subjects at Summer Shorts.

Stephen Trovillion is so fabulously prim and fey as the gay sheep, dangling his martini on his knee, that you begin to regard his wool costume as evening wear. There are three plays in the festival that somehow involve the French. One of them is about a couple in bed tensely but tenderly discussing a work of French erotic fiction. Another features a mercurial French sock puppet, who has attached itself to the left arm of a psychiatric patient. In Paris You Will Find Many Baguettes But Only One True Love sees a couple of girlfriends at park benches near the Eiffel Tower, one with her mime lover, the other mourning her own lack of romance. They’re American tourists. Antonio Amadeo is charming as a mime, but he isn’t skilled enough to be convincing: his invisible box, for example, has vague parameters. But there’s a good reason for that. He’s not a mime, but a clown from Manitoba, Canada, faking mimehood because his paramour always wanted to fall in love with a French street performer (who doesn’t?). On Story, penned by television writer Bill Wrubel, brought sitcom onto the stage with impressive results. The audience was in an uproar when Trovillion tried tearing open a bag of potato chips with his teeth. Another scene had a just-fired writer wittily convincing his milquetoast supervisor to reverse the firing.

But maybe the whole night goes to Laura Turnbull in Laura Keene Goes On. Dressed in a magnificent and constantly revolving hoop skirt, Turnbull’s Laura Keene is a cosmic force. She’s a 19th century diva full of disdain, self-regard, grandiloquence, and narcissistic delusion. When Lincoln is shot upon the night of her 1000th performance of Our American Cousin, she never gets the picture, insisting from backstage that the show must, must, must go on. She has nothing but contempt for Lincoln, his “mad wife,” and most of all John Wilkes Booth, the ham-actor-turned-assassin. She is so certain that her presence on stage will put an end to all the hoopla and ado that I came to believe it, too. She would thunder into her last scene of Our American Cousin, the auditorium would go quiet, and even Lincoln, with a bullet in his brain, would come out of his slouch and look raptly at Laura Keene, resplendent and utterly above it all.