This past Monday night the Sandbox Artists Collective held its Spring Salon, An Ensemble Playground, with member actors reading short plays that member playwrights had written specifically for them, with an added twist that each playwright had to use seven of ten words assigned by another participating playwright. I know that the trope “honor and pleasure” gets thrown around a lot, but in this case, my experience of being the member sponsor for this salon was unequivocally both, and you can add “thrill” and a “joy” to the mix, since the whole process reminded me a bit of childhood Christmases, when making presents ran a close second to the fun of opening them.
I jotted some notes which I share with you here, mostly roughhewn:
Preshow
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People are wandering in, enjoying the food, wine and cookies. Some Sandboxers, but other folks too, including– god help us all!– young people interested in fresh and locally grown plays.
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7:10, everyone is still eating, drinking, chatting, playing pinball machines and getting to know one another, which was the primary intent of this salon so I’m reluctant to get things started.
Play One
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Anita Montgomery’s “The Ties that Bind”
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Early it dawns that Leslie Law and Peter Dylan O’Connor are playing sister and brother, and it’s perfect. Not only do they convincingly look the parts but their interaction is laced with that particular pain that only a brother and sister grown apart suffer.
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Is this great acting, great writing, great casting? Well, the writing essentially is the casting, so . . .
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Fold in Dave Natale as the palpably estranged step-brother, again pitch perfect, and the brilliance builds, blissfully untraceable to any single artist in the process, the way great theatre should be?
Play Two
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Ki Gottberg’s “Felt”
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Leaps straightaway from the precipice of “qualia” one of Ki’s ten assigned words (by me: full disclosure).
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Richard Ziman, gamely filling in for Shawn Belyea, plays a lovable pompous philandering pendant, bookended by his wife (Tracy Hyland) and his young lover (Renata Friedman).
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Again the voices are pitch perfect. Even the silences with which both Tracey and Renata charge the beginning of the piece seem written particularly for them.
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Ki writes four roles actually, gamely making full thematic use of the yet-to-be born Hyland baby Tracy so gracefully carries.
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The arc of the piece, launching in absurdist comic verbosity gently lofts into a bitter-sweeter, clearer atmosphere and touches down so gently in shared humanity. Maybe we can share our experiences, our “qualia”.
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So exciting to see another playwright attack a subject I have longed to approach and do it so differently and successfully.
Play Three
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“The Eulogy” by Elizabeth Heffron
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Immediately we know that Mik Kuhlman, Lori Larsen and Seanjohn Walsh are siblings. Siblings again! and also death, as they’re at a funeral: Anita’s characters were at a viewing.
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Elizabeth clearly knows each of her actors so well that she can trust them with just enough dialogue to nail the moment without overdrawing it.
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The local references to a Ballard and a sex besotted Scandinavian parking lot king has the audience eating out of the palm of Elizabeth hands. They can taste freshness, like eating a salmon they just watched being pulled out of the locks.
Play Four
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“Satsuma” by me, featuring Rik Deskin and Gin Hammond.
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Again the performers find their characters’ voices like virtuoso’s picking up their favorite fiddle
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And again, it’s siblings. What’s with the synchronicity? Is it that many of us in the Sandbox have known each other for so long that we see each other as brothers and sisters? Or is it, like Lori Larsen suggests in the talkback, just some Jungian archetype that happens to be floating for the moment in the collective ether. Either way, it seems like a phenomenon uniquely connected to the immediacy of the work.
Afterwards, we all agree we have to do something like this again. The theatrical potentialities unleashed in the fusion of local playwrights with local actors with local audiences are just too powerful to ignore or leave untapped. I know the Big Houses are busy staying alive, but they need to ask themselves why they are not more actively engaged in this uniquely fertile process. There’s surviving and then there’s thriving, and Monday night felt like the latter to me.
And not just me. Every person in that room felt it. That’s the singular beauty of theatre. At its best, there’s nothing singular about it.