Theater Review: Women's playwriting fest a big disappointment
PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- If Festival51, the women's play writing festival that got underway this past weekend at Mixed Magic Theatre, in any way represents what women playwrights are up to, then we're in big trouble.
The festival, which runs through mid-August, features four plays and a 20-minute video that run in repertory. At the opening on Friday night Ainslie Caswell's "The Waitress" was paired with Eugenie Chan's rambling, impenetrable monologue "Bone to Pick."
I really couldn't get into Caswell's pointless piece about a waitress who works in a restaurant that can fill your every need. But compared to Chan's pretentious doggerel, it seemed like "King Lear."
Makiesha Horsley is the waitress in a restaurant that has no menus and can prepare any dish imaginable. She spends her time waiting on a couple of irritating women, who share the space with a woeful woman with a "Please help" sign around her neck. In some ways it seems like an episode from "The Twilight Zone," the way nothing quite adds up. But it also seems like a fledgling attempt by an unseasoned writer to produce something clever.
That was followed by Shannon McCloud's film, "Therapy," which finds our favorite fairy-tale characters sitting down to a group therapy session. The concept isn't so bad, but the film is crude, with poor sound quality, and it's hard to come up with some sort of message or point to it all.
I would have been content to deal with these two offerings, but then came Chan's one-woman rant, which was just too much to take. At the close of the show the woman next to me said, "What was that? And I'm a theater person."
"Bone," directed by festival co-producer Leann Heath, is supposed to take its inspiration from the Ariadne myth, Ariadne being the goddess assigned to the maze of the Minotaur, but you'd hardly know it. Oddly, Victoria Ezikovich's Ariadne is also a waitress in a restaurant, but one that has nothing to offer.
Ezikovich deserves a hand for memorizing this interminable, often nonsensical monologue. But you've got to wonder what is the point of it all. It's really an hour or so of gibberish that's supposed to seem poetic and imagistic, but just dies over and over again.
The festival, by the way, takes its name from the fact that women make up 51 percent of the population but account for only 17 percent of the plays being produced in this country. But you'd think the organizers of this festival might have wanted to make a better case for female authors.
The other two plays which run on alternating nights are Susan Goodell's "Hope Throws Away Her Heart" and "Echoes on the Peaks" by Deborah DeGeorge Harbin. Perhaps they offer more in the way of substance and craft.
But at least half the plays are a big disappointment.
The festival runs though Aug. 15 at Mixed Magic Theatre, 560 Mineral Spring Ave., Pawtucket. Tickets are $10. Call (401) 285-0351, or visit festival51.org.
CORRECTION: The original version of this review incorrectly rendered the name Festival51 as two words.
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