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An Overview of the New Summer Play Festival
By Jenny Sandman
Traditionally summer is a slow season for theatre, but you wouldn't know it in New York right now. In addition to the usual offerings, festivals are thick and heavy this year. There's the Fringe Festival, the Midtown International Theater Festival, the Hot! Festival, and HERE's 15th American Living Room series. And now there's the first annual Summer Play Festival, playing to sold-out houses, which threatens to trump them all.
This newcomer to the festival scene has garnered an unusual amount of press for a first-time event, primarily because of its producer, Arielle Tepper. Possessed of a third of a billion dollar family fortune, this 31-year-old has boldly decided to use her share to finance the arts. On the heels of co-producing A Raisin in the Sun and Jumpers on Broadway, she has now put forth $1 million of her own money for this festival. Interestingly, she has managed to pull together eighteen plays in a matter of weeks (the first call for submissions went out in March) . Truly, a miracle of planning, especially when you consider that the selection committee received more than 1,000 submissions.
Conveniently housed at Theatre Row on 42nd Street, all the plays are by young, fresh and upcoming playwrights, many of whom have begun to garner a reputation for themselves (Neena Beber, Jordan Harrison, Brooke Berman). While none are novices, neither have any of them had a breakout production. The plays are directed by hot downtown directors like Ken Rus Schmoll and Trip Cullman and feature some exciting new acting talent. In a departure from standard procedure, Tepper waived all rights to the shows, including right of first refusal. As she put it in a New York Times feature (July 4, 2004) "Here's the deal. I'll pay for it this year. I never want to pay for it again. This year I don't want any money. My goal is that these writers have a future. " She tadded that she would pay for it again another year, though this may not be necessary.
Tepper just announced a series of educational outreach programs for the development of SPF's playwrights. London's National Theatre and New York's New Dramatists, both imminently prestigious institutions, will nurture these writers. Selected SPF writers will work at the National Theatre Studio with British directors, culminating in staged readings of their work at the National Theatre; New Dramatists has created a laboratory for new musical theatre.
Obviously, the New Play Festival is an outstanding opportunity for everyone involved, and from what I've seen I can say that it's an outstanding festival. The quality is top-notch--from the scripts to the actors to the sets, it seems that no expense has been spared. The acting was uniformly exceptional, the direction was visionary, the design was imaginative and resourceful. Of the eighteen shows, I saw five, including one musical. The audiences at each event was o responsive and engrossed, and many people saw more than one show.
Wet, by Liz Duffy Adams, was one of the funnier and more inventive offerings. After a fierce storm, a group of pirate queens (with a crossdressing countess in tow) capture a disabled ship stuck in the horse latitudes with only three men left. They must learn to coexist long enough to bring the limping ship into some port. During a bout of storytelling, they begin to uncover the truth about each other, and at the end, they are revived by a breath of fresh air--both literally and figuratively. Adams' writing is lyrical and circuitous, with an almost Shakespearean weight to it. While her earlier plays had mostly mixed reviews, this script shows a new maturity and depth to her writing, and really showcases her sly, literary sense of humor.
The Dew Point, by Neena Beber, was the most traditional play. Beber is well-known for her dense, conventional writing, and this is more of the same. --with strong writing,, and a tight structure. It's a relationship play that involves Mimi's womanizing ex-boyfriend's dating one of her best friends. She wants her friend to be happy, but also knows he's cheating on her. When the truth finally comes out (as it always does), Mimi is forced to re-evaluate her current relationship and her need to remain friends with the man who broke her heart so long ago. While engaging, the large space hampered the intimacy of the story.
Jordan Harrison's Kid-Simple is a re-mount from Actors Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival. It received mixed reviews there, but seems to have found a more receptive home at SPF. In it a nerdy inventress invents a machine for hearing sounds that cannot be heard, using a piece of her own ear. A Mercenary steals it away from her, after stealing her heart, and she must track him (and it) down using a boy virgin as her guide. The show is inventive (no pun intended) and quirky, with an elaborately surreal set and an even more elaborate sound design. The production values were the best of any I saw, and the play itself was certainly the most unusual.
Heather McDonald's Pink was the most disturbing and provocative, but also the most thought-provoking. Jenny is your average almost-12-year-old girl, giggling with her best friends Claire and Jeremy. On the verge of puberty, their thoughts and play turn more and more to their bodies; they're young enough to be giggly but old enough to be sexually adventurous, and one night, their play goes too far. Their story mirrors the adult sexual dysfunction of their parents, showing us that kids are more perceptive than you think and also reminding us of the shivery sort of sexual tension rampant in early adolescence--everything is fraught with danger at that age. McDonald's writing shows a depth and sensitivity toward the subject matter that is unusual--few playwrights can write so accurately and honestly about child sexuality.
Prozak and the Platypus, written by Elise Thoron and Jill Sobule, delighted musical fans. Prozak is a lonely angst-ridden teenage girl whose mother has just died and whose father drowns himself in his work--in this case, studying the dream cycles of a platypus. Prozak similarly drowns herself in her music, fronting for a rock band, while she forms a psychic bond with the platypus and with a mysterious mentor known only as Blue. Fittingly, the play is about dreams--both the REM cycle kind and the more elusive kind. The music starts out quiet and haunting, but become more and more raucous as Prozak becomes angrier. For such a little girl, she has a powerhouse voice. Prozak and the Platypus doesn't follow the usual configuration of a musical; it's more of a collection of rock songs with a backstory to string them together. While the book leaves something to be desired, the music is fierce and memorable.
The festival's most obvious thematic unity is that traditional structure and storytelling has become the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps traditional narrative has proven unsatisfactory, but more likely this new generation of playwrights has realized that television and film remain the bastion of traditional storytelling. If they are to compete with the multitude of entertainment options, they must offer new and different stories, ones that are inherently theatrical but also resonate to an audience raised on MTV and video games. It seems the Summer Play Festival showcases this new storytelling; and if its playwrights can find commercial success outside it, then Tepper won't need to finance the festival next year or any other. If SPF's success this year is any indication, it will (and should) be around for a long time to come.
Retold by Tina Packer of Shakespeare & Co.
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