THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, April 20, 1995 TAG: 9504180104
SECTION: NORFOLK COMPASS PAGE: 14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: THEATER REVIEW
SOURCE: MONTAGUE GAMMON III
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
The student-directed festivals of one-act plays at Old Dominion University always introduce welcome talent to local audiences or showcase familiar talent in new lights.
The current version carries a special reminder of how important such young talent can be - one of the scripts produced was written by the acclaimed Beth Henley in her college years.
That piece, ``Am I Blue,'' is the high point of the five-play evening and not only because the writing stands far above that of the other scripts. Director Sandy Holcombe, who has done some nice acting in years past, and assistant director/choreographer Michael Barriskill have crafted a sensitive, tender piece that has a fully finished look.
Edwin Castillo has the role of a fraternity boy, approaching his 18th birthday, who encounters a quirky high school girl in the sleazy bars of New Orleans during Mardi Gras. Megan van der Geissen, who is a student actress to watch for, plays the girl. Their exchange of confidences, and the evolution of their friendship, carries the sense of genuine communication.
Dan Alvarez, another familiar face on the ODU stages, directed three pieces for the festival. The scale of such an undertaking would warrant attention even if he hadn't managed to produce, as he did, three separate works that were carefully and individually realized.
Alvarez is clearly interested, in this phase of his directorial development, with the interface between performer and audience and the way that interface affects the transition between life before a performance and the performance itself.
Two of his plays, ``Naomi in the Living Room'' by Christopher Durang and ``The Asshole Murder Case'' by Stuart Hample, take particular pains to blur and manipulate the boundaries between reality and illusion.
In the first script Sam Shepherd's methodology meets Durang's familiar themes of pop culture and maternal dysfunction. This encounter between a crazed mother, her cross-dressing son and his wife has all the marks of being originally derived by actors in workshop improvisations. Celia Burnett gets to pull out all the stops in the title role. Josh Doyle and Gretchen Kenney are both funny as the son and daughter-in-law, and Miss van der Geissen makes a brief appearance looking nothing like her character in ``Am I Blue.''
Hample's script is an inconsequential little exercise in writing a play within a play. The subject is college life, and the work may have come out of a playwriting class, as did Henley's script. Don't expect ever to hear Hample mentioned in the same breath as Henley, unless he learns to edit his work ruthlessly. Bryan Salerno brings lots of energy and all the discipline the play requires to his leading role, while David Fay, Emily Cromwell and Ashley Roller all acquit themselves well.
``Watermelon Boats,'' the short Wendy McLaughlin dialogue that opens the festival, gives Roller and Michelle Ahern the opportunity to play two friends as they age from 11 to 21. Alvarez elicited two believable, unforced performances in this warm-hearted, pleasantly predictable play.
If the final piece of the festival, ``Rosalee Pritchett,'' had been done as a main stage piece, comments here would be confined to furious railing about how ham-fisted writing sank what could have been an important commentary about racial conflict and racial identity beneath fathoms of tedious and repetitive drive, saturated with cliches, facile caricatures and puerile attempts at satire.
Instead, ``Rosalie Pritchett'' should serve as a wake-up call for anyone with the endurance to sit through its long-winded inanities.
The point is not just that students in such a successful program as ODU's actually think such simple-minded, cartoonish playwriting has dramatic merit. Rather, we must pay attention to the fact that young African-Americans, director Keith Butler and his sizable cast, should in 1995 still feel the lash of racism so strongly that they would devote the considerable time and energy needed to mount this work, which concerns the rape of a suburban black housewife by white National Guardsmen in a riot-torn city.
Tara Whitehurst was convincingly pathetic in the title role, but the real importance of this production is more social than theatrical. Race relations have not progressed much in three decades if ``Rosale Pritchett'' still seems relevant to anyone. by CNB