Center
Stage with Pat Launer on KSDS JAZZ88
THEATER REVIEWS
Baldwin New Play Festival –
UC
AIRDATE: APRIL 23, 2010
Okay, listen up, cause
I have a lot to tell you. But first, let’s lay some groundwork. If you’re a
theaterlover, you don’t just covet the classics. You want to see what’s new,
what’s hot, what creative light is breaking over the horizon. And there’s no
better place to get a bird’s eye view than at the Baldwin New Play Festival at
UC San Diego. It’s quite the cornucopia this year: three full-length plays, two
one-acts, and a reading of the winner of the Dr. Floyd Gaffney National
Playwriting Competition. The settings range from high school to
I don’t know how many you have the time to
see, so maybe I’ll just tell you about the one-acts, written by the first-year
students in the acclaimed 3-year MFA program in playwriting at UCSD. Let me
just say that all these student writers are the crème de la crème in the
country. The program is highly selective. Those accepted have already amassed
extensive bios before they set foot in
The most haunting of the long plays is
Stephanie Timm’s “Everything Nice,” about bullying,
retaliation, guilt and recrimination in high school girls. It all comes to a
head at the 20-year reunion, when the ghosts of long ago just will not go away.
Jeff Wienckowski directs this searing psychological
thriller that makes your intellectual/emotional hairs stand on end.
I also couldn’t get the two one-acts out of
my mind. “In a Word,” by Lauren Yee, ingeniously staged by the Patté
Award-winning director Adam Arian, is about the aftermath of the disappearance
of an 8 year-old boy, and how the event has impacted and fractured his parents.
Words are at the core of her search for her son, her memories of the events of
that horrific day, and the attempt to reclaim her marriage and her life. word-play, misunderstanding, words written, chosen,
replaced, deconstructed. It’s wonderfully imaginative and heartbreaking. And outstandingly performed.
“Muzungu” is the Kinyarwanda word for ‘white man.’ in this haunting
play of the same name, by David Myers, sensitively helmed by xx-year MFA
director Anthony Luciano, a well-meaning, do-gooder
American man meets a stalwart but damaged Rwandan woman. Though he comes to
provide assistance, it’s he who gets an education. Both their lives are
changed, in ways neither expected.
Both plays feature a large dose of anguish
and unearthly journeys of the heart. See as many of these shows as you can. You
won’t be sorry.
The Baldwin New
Play Festival runs through April 24, at UC San Diego in
©2010 PAT LAUNER