This past week, Adam Szymkowicz posted the 800th
interview he's done over the past six years on his website "I Interview
Playwrights" (click here to read it). Many of his subjects have won awards, done fellowships and had readings
at prestigious places but only true diehards will have heard of most of them
because there simply aren't enough chances for young playwrights to get their
work before real-live audiences.
Which is why I so appreciate Lincoln Center Theater's LCT3
and the Roundabout Theatre Company's Underground series, both of which
specialize in putting on well-cast productions of new plays by fledgling
playwrights in their small black box theaters and charging just $25 a ticket as
a way to encourage theatergoers to take a chance on seeing them—and to bring in
new theatergoers who haven't seen much at all.
Each company is currently running a play centered around the
kind of people (in this case, working class women) whose stories are seldom
told on stage and while neither work is anywhere near perfect, both are worth seeing.
Abe Koogler's Kill Floor, which will end its run at Lincoln
Center's Claire Tow Theater next weekend, focuses on Andy, an ex-con who's
trying to get her life back together after serving time for dealing drugs.
But
the only job Andy can find is in a slaughter house where she has to strip
carcasses before the animals are completely dead and the only home she can
afford is too tiny to accommodate the resentful son she had to leave in
the care of strangers while she was in prison.
Andy's only hope for a better life is to sleep with her
boss, who's a nice guy but married and not above dangling the possibility of a job
away from the horrors of the titular kill floor in exchange for favors.
In the meantime, Andy's biracial son Brendan, whom she calls
B, is wrestling not only with conflicted feelings about his mother but
unrequited ones about another boy at school who seems willing to hang around
only when B supplies him with pot and blow jobs.
Marin Ireland is achingly good as Andy, who knows how the
rest of the world sees her and knows, too, that the odds are stacked against
her being anything else, a realization underscored in a poignant scene in which
Andy attempts to bond with a more affluent woman she meets in a
supermarket.
And the baby-faced Nicholas L. Ashe (click here to read a Q&A with him) is totally convincing as her teenage son B, creating a
heartrending portrait of a youngster tottering on a high rope between boyhood
and manhood, with no security net underneath.
Koogler and director Lila Neugebauer (click here to read an interview with her) try to relieve the grimness of Andy and B's lives with
comic relief supplied by B's crush Simon, a white kid who affects the
mannerisms of a black rapper, but the play is better at charting the emotional
damage that society too often inflicts on its weakest members.
The damages are both emotional and physical in Lindsey
Ferrentino's Ugly Lies the Bone, which will play through Dec. 6 at the Roundabout's
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center. It tells the story of Jess, who, during her
third tour in Afghanistan, was the victim of an IED attack that's left her with
severe burns over most of her body and face, in need of multiple operations
(three alone to reconstruct her eyelid) in severe pain (hovering between 8 and
9 on a scale of 0 to 10) and in fear of crippling flashbacks that can be set
off by the sight of a burning match or an unexpected sound.
Jess finds some relief in therapeutic virtual reality
sessions that take her mind off the pain by transporting her—and the audience—to the place of
her dreams, a snow-covered field that is
far away from her every day life in a sultry Florida town grappling with hard
times caused by the shutdown of NASA's shuttle program.
When Jess leaves the rehab sessions, she has to deal with
the actual reality of an old boyfriend who has married someone else and a
mother who has dementia and may not recognize her.
Working with what seems to have been an extremely limited
budget, Patricia McGregor's directorial options are limited but Ferrentino has
created nuanced characters and McGregor has gotten fine work out of her five-member
cast.
Mamie Gummer, who has spent the last four years doing TV
series like "Emily Owens, M.D. and movies like "Ricki and the Flash"
opposite her mom Meryl Streep, turns in the best performance I've seen her give
(click here to read an interview with the actress). She makes clear the pain
Jess suffers, without succumbing to the stereotypes of saintly victim or cocky
survivor.
Both plays felt simultaneously overstuffed (I'm not sure we
needed the coming out subplot for B in Kill Floor or the deadbeat boyfriend of
Jess' sister in Ugly Lies the Bone) and slightly undercooked (neither runs
longer than 90 minutes and both seem to stop mid-thought) but it's clear that
their authors have curiosity about lives
outside the theatrical mainstream and talent that should be nurtured. I'm eager to see what each of them does in the future and which other writers these terrific initiatives showcase next.
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