Summer Shorts are hot for June
City Theatre’s Summer Shorts festival scores big with top-notch production
BY KAREEM TABSCH
Published: Jun 12, 2008
Summer Shorts is the highly anticipated theater festival where the oft-neglected art of short plays reigns supreme. Presented by City Theatre, Summer Shorts is currently in its 13th year, and rather than suffer from teenage angst, it’s experiencing an amazing growth spurt.
This year’s festival is the biggest yet, a 5-week event in both Miami (at the Arsht Center) and in Broward (at the Performing Arts Center). Summer Shorts presents 4 different offerings, including two different ‘Signature Shorts’ programs of general interest, a collection of “Shorts 4 Kids,” and a new program called ‘Undershorts,’ which folds edgier subject matter into a more risqué program.
Unlike a full-length play that lasts two or three acts, shorts are a mixed bag where the audience doesn’t know what may be next. If it’s good, it has punch; if one play doesn’t hit the mark, they’ve moved on to the next before the audience realized it.
In City Theatre’s productions of Signature Shorts A and Signature Shorts B, both productions stand as complete shows on their own; buying tickets to both shows on one night is possible, but not necessary. While there certainly are some pieces that could have used more contextualization (why, exactly, are those actors screaming at one another?) both programs are chock-full of substance and don’t disappoint. If Summer Shorts were a hot-dog brand, it could easily claim “No Filler.”
The work of theater heavyweights like David Mamet and Paul Rudnick appear in Program B, but it is Signature Shorts Program A that provides a more memorable experience. Program A features “Silence,” by Henry Meyerson, about two Nazi holocaust survivors who find each other after the war but lose their way when their son dies. The woes of social climbing parents are hilariously skewered when a pair of New York yuppies attempts to get their toddler into a top-notch Montessori academy, but are confronted with a shocking (and extremely funny) obstacle to his admission, in Justin Warner’s “Parent Interview.” The effects that abuse has on the family of the perpetrator are solemnly unearthed in Edwin Sanchez’s “Jody’s Mother,” a one-woman piece where the mother of a pedophile confesses her inner turmoil. (The show is rumored to be based on an actual perpetrator caught by the famous Dateline child-porn investigations.) M. Thomas Cooper brings together two neurotics, whose lives are dictated by the free-willed puppets on their hands, in the uproarious “Tongue Tied.” Rounding out Program A is local playwright Michael McKeever’s hysterical “Laura Keene Goes On,” set backstage at the famed Ford Theater, featuring an actress who won’t let the assassination of a certain president in the box seats get in the way of her ovation.
Program B is the more gay-centric program of the two, opening with a cute first-person account of a gay sheep’s life in “Sheepish” by Paul Rudnick, who famously wrote the script of the gay love story “Jeffrey.” Bill Wrubel, who penned scripts for the TV show “Will and Grace”, wrote “On Point”. However, Program B is laden with much heavier fare, exploring marriage and mundanity of life, without pushing the envelope as much as Program A.
The company of actors jumps from play to play, each performing multiple roles in several shows, and they do a remarkable job with every new role. But Laura Turnbull, Stephen Trovillion and Elena Garcia steal the stage. It is very evident that Garcia was born to do comedy, dazzling at every line delivery. In “Parent Interview,” when she responds to one character’s admission of a family history of breast cancer with “ Oh, well doesn’t everyone these days!” or voicing a sock puppet as a stereotypical caricature of an African-American in “Tongue Tied,” she flies in the face of political correctness; but with such deftly-timed delivery and sharp comedic wit, she gets away with line deliveries that would otherwise make the audience squirm, and the comedy gods can’t hold back the chuckles.
Trovillion is an actor’s actor, as flawless and brilliant with comedy as he is with drama. He is equally charming as a queer sheep who admits that his father’s reaction to his coming out was “you’d have been better to be turned into a cheap Peruvian cardigan worn by a prostitute in Alaska,” as he is playing a concentration camp survivor whose son’s death is “worse than the camps.”
No actor’s range is more obvious than Turnbull’s, who rips your soul apart as the mother of a child molester whose son’s crime turns her into a victim, and then moments later dives into comedy as the self-proclaimed “star” Laura Keene.
Possessing an infectious energy and joie de vivre, Summer Shorts proves that the true faux pas would be missing the festival--and with the informal nature of the shows, you can even wear shorts to the theater.
