Reaction Paper: Louisville Playwright Festival, Six Plays

When the play started, I was having a lot of trouble seeing the actors. That was a flaw in the seating at the Rudyard Kipling. The audience was literally inches away from the stage, in a half-rectangle arrangement. But most of the seats were on the sides.

The dialog was a little hard to follow just because it was deliberately mundane, I think. The twist of the play is that two people, Patrick and Laura, were sitting at a table in a restaurant on a date. Seated behind them were an actor and actress playing their consciences. Periodically, Patrick or Laura would say something, then their conscience would jump up and tell us what they were really thinking. It was entertaining, but I have seen this twist before. The playwright should have asked himself, "is the plot strong enough without this crutch?" The secondary plot of a book that Patrick wrote and Laura happened to have read as part of her job was interesting, but the conclusion of that is left up in the air.

I felt like what I saw was the first act of a many act play. One strong point was the change both characters went through during the play. For the first half, Patrick was trying to say anything he could to attract Laura, and Laura was disinterested. After she learned about the book he wrote, Laura became attracted to Patrick, and Patrick became repulsed due to the embarrassment that she knew who he was and what he wrote as being a true story. I never picked up on what was so bad about his story, that could have been explained better.

This was a sweet play in which a young lady, Janis, sits on a park bench with her former boyfriend and (perhaps) lover, Fletcher. Fletcher became a priest, and it was obvious the two still shared feelings of unrequited love. One of the highlights was a prop device. Janis got Fletcher a present, a "lollipop priest crucifix", which was a pink lollipop in the shape of the cross. Janis took off the wrapper, put the lollipop in her mouth, and sucked on it, seductively, totally unnerving Fletcher. The final exchange of the play was powerful. As Fletcher was leaving, their relationship was ending. She says, "You never did say what your heaven is like." Fletcher responds, "It’s like – you." Then he walks off. I thought Janis had a standout performance, she really emoted well and made the audience empathize with her. And the playwright did a good job of building two characters in a star-crossed love affair.

This play was my favorite of the six. Unlike the other five, it really capitalized on the promise that they mentioned at the beginning of the plays, that they were trying to "communicate one-on-one with the audience in a small theatre." In this play, a lot of the action took place in the audience. It was also an absurd play. Several assassins bring their victims to a secluded spot by a stone to perform their jobs. They argue, and the victims make some bizarre comments, such as when one of the victims, fed up with all the chit-chat, proclaims, "can we please get on with this?"

Some of the assassins run off into the audience to shoot each other. The effect of this gave the audience a feeling of intimacy with the play, that they might somehow be sucked into the action, though it never actually happened. There was one actor that tipped over a lady’s drink and ad-libbed, "sorry about that!"

This play featured a main character, the neophyte female assassin, who grows as the play progresses. At first she is tentative, but in the end she learns she can do her job – and then some.

I have to preface my comments by saying I knew the playwright, Alexander Thompson, and I had read his play last semester in another class, so I was familiar with the material. The title is a bit unwieldy, but this play had arguably the starkest effect on the audience of any of the six. The first half of it is a comedy. The main character, Digby, tries to convince the bishop that they need to have fast food faith. He wants to implement true happiness meals, God Burgers, and Cruci-fries. The audience was laughing hard at most of this. But toward the end, the play gets macabre. Digby is insane, and he strangles the Bishop, who had threatened to have him stripped of his rank in the church. It was amazing watching the reaction of the audience, going from almost in tears laughing to anxious silence. The play did an excellent job of toying with the audience's emotions. Also, the actor who played Digby was great at conveying his enthusiasm first, and his maniacal insanity last.

I did not get this one. It was about two ladies sitting, talking, and knitting. They turned out to be sisters, and then one of them had to leave with a guest, a very attractive actress. I did not understand where or why she was leaving.

This was another absurd play. The main character, Nadir Brit, is a producer of plays. He has an odd way of talking; every sentence is in pairs, and they always rhyme. The plot is Brit interviewing Playwrights who pitch their plays, and Brit decides whether to pay for them or not. The interactions between Brit and the Playwrights were all humorous, the best being the Playwright of Mirth. A lot of this play was about funny movements the characters made, weird facial expressions, and how their dialog mixed together. The actor that played Brit did an excellent job of bringing him alive with all his quirks. His performance was one of the strongest of the night. The play was a little lacking in plot, but the characters were so strong and they were doing so many interesting things on stage that it didn’t matter.