Last night’s 24 Hour Theatre Project at the Caldwell proved, once again, that the playwrights, actors and directors that comprise the South Florida theater community can achieve the seemingly impossible: not only creating and mounting plays from scratch in a one-day period, but creating and mounting
plays that were enviable, hilarious and largely ready to tour – that have the polish of extensive workshopping. These were plays that, amazingly, bested the national material culled from thousands of selections to make up this past year’s (or any year’s) Summer Shorts program. It seems that, to produce a mini masterpiece, all our talent requires is a day.
At 7 p.m. Sunday, after drawing names of directors, stage managers and actors at random, the eight playwrights selected their title from a list of ridiculous ones submitted by the event’s creators, Katherine and Antonio Amadeo of Naked Stage. They wrote all night and passed their words on to their directors, who worked all day Monday with their four-piece (or in one case, five-piece) casts to bring the plays to life.
The final product was divided by an intermission and came across as two very different sides of consistently entertaining record. The first half had the material most suitable for all audiences. The opening play, Tony Finstrom’s “Imaginary Friends,” was the most inside-jokey of the bunch, with Laura Turnbull sitting in as Finstrom’s on-stage surrogate, trying to hammer out a play in 24 hours while her two fictitious muses – a meditating Barbara Sloan and a roller skate-wearing Margery Lowe – persistently annoy her. This play got considerable comic mileage at the expense of Michael McKeever and Katherine Amadeo, both of whom “appeared” in the play in some form or another. This was a fun opener, and Lowe was terrific, reminding us that she should do more comedy.
Next up was Stuart Meltzer’s “Hubris and the Rain Cloud,” with Melissa Minyard, Irene Adjan and Andrea Conte as three sisters who meet in a restaurant to confront a server (Mikaela Schipani, of last season’s “America’s Next Top Model”) who is sleeping with one of their husbands. This piece worked better in parts than as a whole, but it had some of the funniest one-liners of the evening and, in a night full of comedy, it ended on an effective dramatic ellipsis, more melancholic than cathartic.
It was followed by “Ifigenia and the Inadequate Wand,” a busy mouthful written by Andie Arthur about a greenhorn rabbit picked up by a washed-up illusionist (Ken Clement) as part of his magic act. Laura Hodos and Amy McKenna both donned bunny ears and bushy tails and munched on oversized carrots; Hodos’ performance in particular was an adorable comic highlight, and Clement generated plenty of laughs as a former actor with Shakespearean pretenses. The piece eventually suffered from overlength, as it tended to lose its direction, but it was a charming fable – the last shred of innocence in a program that would soon spiral into the R-rated gutter.
Juan C. Sanchez’s “Love in Stereo” concluded Act One on a solid note. His play was carried by the shrewd performances of two South Florida directors/producers, Nan Barnett and Clive Cholerton, both playing against type as a bruising redneck couple with secret sexual perversions. Marckenson Charles and Jackie Rivera, as a younger couple with their own problems, seemed completely stable by comparison.
Then there was the second act of plays, a hilarious cesspool of hedonism beginning with Chris Demos-Brown’s “A Martian Among Us.” Oscar Cheda played a man with a most unusual talent: He can point at anyone and make them orgasm, which he proceeded to do to a cast of willing participants like Anne Chamberlain, Michaela Cronan and Andrew Wind. The conceit was somewhat familiar to anyone who’s seen Trey Parker’s porn satire “Orgazmo,” but this was still a fresh and inspired piece, one of the funniest plays of the evening and one tailor-made for an adult sketch-comedy series.
It was followed by “Marvin Becomes a Man,” the only dud of the night, and I’m not going to spend much time on it. The great Elizabeth Dimon did her best with awkward, inferior material. Things picked up full-steam-ahead with “Holy Mary, Mother of Todd,” a wonderful slab of surrealist theatre set at a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting attended by Sweeney Todd (Cliff Burgess), his lesbian mother (Sally Bondi), a dirty priest (Matthew Chiezever) and – why not? – the Virgin Mary (Deborah L. Sherman). Amy Miller Brennan portrayed the hermaphrodite presiding over the sordid, “South Park”-esque proceedings. Directed with snap and wit by Avi Hoffman, this was one of the best works of the night, alongside…
… the closing play, Michael McKeever’s “Love Machine, Rusted,” another terrific skit-like comedy about the potential dangers of meeting anonymous sexual partners on Craigs List. Adam Simpson and Betsy Graver are a couple whose sex life is on the rocks (hence the play’s title); John Felix and Karen Stephens are the hysterically incongruent pair of perverts they’ve invited over to spice things up. McKeever’s eyes must have lit up when he picked Felix and Stephens, but this entire cast proved exceptional; Graver was the best I’ve ever seen her.
More than last year’s event (the first one I attended), the 2011 24 Hour Theatre Project felt like the theater community’s cherished gift to itself. For me, it was like a theatrical Christmas; I received eight gifts and couldn’t be happier with the results.
