A Little Something for Everyone at Spotlighters

 

The final entry in the 2009 Baltimore Playwrights Festival, Sex & Desperation: A Little Something for Everyone, seems slightly mistitled. True, each of the production’s four short plays—which range in length from 10 or 15 minutes to an hour—is at least partly about the pursuit of sex (the pursuit is more desperate in some than in others).  Still, I don’t know that sex is as prominent or unifying a theme as director Lynn Morton implies.

This is not a major point—though I do think Morton has unnecessarily narrowed her focus, particularly in the more serious pieces that close each act—because the second half of the title is spot-on.  There is truly “a little something for everyone” in this show, a co-production between the Audrey Herman Spotlighters Theatre and the BPF.  Even better, much of it is very funny.

The first play, Lee Sapperstein’s “Leap Day,” nicely establishes the tone, which generally remains light with occasional hints of darkness.  Sapperstein introduces us to Zera (Megan Therese Rippey) and Og (Maboud Ebrahimzadeh), two unexpectedly articulate Neanderthals with an evolving sense of courtship.  When first we meet them, Og has grabbed Zera by the hair.  But before he can drag her back to his cave, she holds up her hand and demands a little romance.

It’s a cute reversal, and both Rippey and Ebrahimzadeh transition seamlessly from one kind of caricature (the helpless woman and the grunting caveman) to another (the empowered woman and the enlightened … caveman). The play become a bit muddled at the end—Sapperstein invents a primitive ritual called Leap Day, which sounds a bit like a Stone Age Sadie Hawkins Dance but which never quite makes sense as a plot device. Such quibbles aside, it all adds up to a fun, breezy opener. 

The fun continues in the first scene of Julie Lewis’s “Monitors on the Quad,” though it’s unfortunate that this piece also begins with Rippey and Ebrahimzadeh, who must execute one of the toughest costume changes of the Festival—ditching the animal skins for business suits in the span of a blackout—and cannot pull it off quickly enough to prevent an awkward lull on an empty stage.

When the actors finally enter they demonstrate much better timing, mining every laugh out of Lewis’s crisp dialogue and reenergizing that reliable comic warhorse: the job interview from hell.  Ebrahimzadeh is particularly sharp as Alexander P, who is hired to “monitor” Justice.  As described by Lewis, the work consists primarily of maintaining the freezing temperature in an offstage room.  Succeed and governments pass progressive legislation and free prisoners of war; fail and old men are thrown in jail for growing medicinal marijuana.

Once an hour Alexander is permitted a smoking break (and man, does the theater fill with smoke!).  He gradually meets his co-workers, each of whom suffers a similar inconvenience “monitoring” another Great Idea. There is Fern (Lexi Martinez), whose hair is perpetually disheveled by the winds of Freedom; Renado (Andrew Syropoulos), who has ruined many a shirt sweating before the Aesthetics oven; Dr. Ashford (Daniel Douek), whose skin has turned to sandpaper in Philosophy’s dry chamber; and the sensual Lorraine (Alex Hewett), whose job is not revealed until the play’s final line.

Though Lewis has an interesting conceit, it’s also a terribly complicated one, and I’m not sure I ever understood the rules according to which this strange little world operates.  Lorraine in particular remains a mystery—there doesn’t appear to be any good reason why her position exists, except to throw wrenches in the plot.  The actors treat their characters as real people punching the clock like any working stiff, no different than if they were bankers, cops, or fry cooks, and so they are most effective in the lighter, funnier moments (of which there are many); when they attempt to tackle weightier themes, the play lacks the structure to support them.

After a 15-minute intermission, the show continues with a more straightforward comedy, Michael Stang’s “The Imperfect Hour.”  Twenty-year-old Martin (Syropoulos), still a virgin, shows up at a sleazy hotel in the red-light district with forty bucks and a bouquet of flowers.  The hotel’s “manager” (Douek) explains to Martin exactly what he can buy for such a pitiful sum.  Perfection costs $500 an hour (plus tip); each imperfection knocks a little off the price.

Not the most fertile grounds for laughter, perhaps, but Stang’s dialogue sparkles and the play—which at times takes on the quality of a vaudeville routine, with Martin as the bewildered straight man—builds to giddily absurd heights, such as when we learn that a prostitute’s roach problem was solved by her rat problem, which was solved by her snake problem, which was solved by her dog, who slurped up the snakes “like a bowl of pasta.”  Syropoulos and Douek play off each other like two old pros and nail every punch line, though (as also happens in “Monitors”) Douek’s thick Argentine accent sometimes obscures his words.

The final play, Gina Young’s “Salt Tears,” is the longest and most ambitious.  Though ostensibly set on a beach in New Jersey, Young soon leaves concrete reality behind, plunging her characters into a series of fantasies—both comic and tragic—involving mermaids, frog princes, and falling stars.  At one point Copernicus morphs into a veteran of the second Iraq war.

Most of these sequences are effective by themselves as isolated bits of theatre.  Where I struggled was fitting them together into a coherent whole.  As it is, I’m not even sure what happens in the literal plot, let alone how Young’s disparate themes and allusions figure into the mix.  At times Morton seems equally unsure—unlike in the earlier plays, the staging in “Salt Tears” is less purposeful.  Actors wander vaguely from beat to beat, and the small Spotlighters stage begins to feel cramped.

As best I could tell, “Salt Tears” dramatizes the emotional fallout from the on-again, off-again relationship between Alison (Martinez) and Sybil (Rippey), two young women who believe they want very different things out of life.  The needier Alison clings to the past and happier memories, not only of Sybil but of every person  she once dared love.  Sybil, colder and more jaded, has agreed to marry the aforementioned soldier.  She seems determined to convince Alison their romance was a lie, at one point screaming, “I am not gay!”

There is no doubt a potent backstory here, but Young explores very little of it, preferring instead for her characters to escape into their fantasy lives.  There are hints that Sybil and Alison have done something terrible to a mutual friend named Emily, but we learn few details, and despite Sybil’s admonitions against making vague statements, both she and Alison are frequently guilty of them.  The result is the sense that Young knows far more about these people than she is willing to share with us, and so their struggles—while clearly of great importance to the playwright—ultimately left me unmoved.

The production design for all four plays is first-rate, particularly the costumes—Helenmary Ball and her intern, Janna Fronczek, run the gamut of styles, from Hanna-Barbera to Fractured Fairy Tales to business casual.  The flexible set and lighting designs, by Michelle Datz and Sarah May, respectively, utilize every inch of the theater, both on and off the stage.  And the poster is magnificent, featuring the most compelling image of the summer.  All things considered, it is a worthy conclusion to this year’s Playwrights Festival.

Sex & Desperation: A Little Something for Everyone is playing at the Audrey Herman Spotlighters Theatre, located at 817 Saint Paul Street in Baltimore, on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m., through September 6^th.  Tickets are $18 ($15 for seniors, students, and BTA members). For more information, visit www.spotlighters.org or call 410-752-1225.

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