Palm Beach Post Theatre Review
Theatre Review: Summer Shorts 2006

By Hap Erstein

Palm Beach Post Theater Writer
Wednesday, June 07, 2006

It is easier to write an effective short drama than it is to write a satisfying short comedy.

At least that is the impression left by Summer Shorts 2006, City Theatre's 11th annual festival of playlets, most of which run about 10 to 15 minutes long. But they can feel even longer when they strain for laughs that they do not earn.
 
For the most part, however, these 16 plays — eight world premieres and eight regional premieres, divided into two programs that can be seen on separate evenings or in one marathon day — land in the winner's column, led by a handful of simple, touching human stories, performed by an ensemble of nine of South Florida's most versatile actors.

Among the highlights is Coffee Break by Carmen M. Herlihy, a chance encounter between Elizabeth Dimon and Antonio Amadeo as two attendees at a support group for the terminally ill. Also affecting is Steven Dietz's September Call-Up, with Ken Clement and Amadeo in a father-son bonding afternoon at the ball park that has a disquieting conclusion. And Labor Day, 1968, is a powerful scene about the arrival of a glad-handing Humble Oil functionary (Stephen Trovillion) to the home of a poor, recently widowed mother (Kameshia Duncan) whose oil rigger husband met a grisly death on the job.

Trovillion does not dominate the festival like he did last year, but he is at the center of the most successful comic piece, Brian PJ Cronin's I Am Drinking The Goddamn Sun. In it, he plays blithely effete Eric Asimov, wine connoisseur-writer-bon vivant for The New York Times, who goes to extreme lengths to savor a mammoth bottle of 1986 Chateau Lafite Rothschild. There is an art to being oversized and subtle at the same time and Trovillion understands it.

He cannot, though, save a childish skit called New Texas: Or, Now That The War is Over, Party On! by Joshua Peskay and Joshua James, an overly broad scene of Dubya and his cronies at his ranch, being their obtuse selves. The lampooning humor is obvious stuff, though Clement is a terrific grunting Dick Cheney and Trovillion makes a nicely constipated Donald Rumsfeld.

Duncan has some crafty moves as a woman who finds a nearly naked man on the subway in Craig Pospisil's Free, and then experiences the liberating feeling of publicly stripping to her undies. And Kim Ostrenko impresses in two plays from Program B, as a harried author in Molly Smith Metzler's Decoding Fruit who receives an inconvenient visit from her mentally challenged brother and as a woman reconnecting with an old female friend in Rosemary & Elizabeth by Leslie Ayvazian.

The few comic misfires aside, this is a strong crop of scripts for City Theatre, perhaps an indication of its growing relationship with Actors Theatre of Louisville, which has championed this theatrical short form. Not everything works, but nor are there any "what-could-they-have-been-thinking" head scratchers.

The two programs are fairly even in quality, with perhaps a slight edge going to Program B. But seeing only that half of the bill would mean missing Cronin's send-up of wine snobbery, which would be a shame.

The evenings feel seamless, which is no easy feat when directed by a team of six directors, ranging from J. Barry Lewis to Kim St. Leon to Paul Tei. Clever musical commentaries bridge the scenes as an energetic stage crew furiously wheels designer Michael Amico's spare but apt set pieces in and out.

Following a month-long run at the University of Miami, Summer Shorts 2006 moves north to Fort Lauderdale's Broward Center, July 6 through 9.