If you’ve been to the New Plays in America Festival in past years, you’ll notice huge differences in this year’s In-The-Works makeover. Beginning next Monday, the 17th annual festival will voyage to venues where no Charlotte Rep production has trekked before. Performance times will sidle into late afternoon, inviting uptown employees of all collar colors to linger and watch reading stage productions of scripts that are facing the public for the first time. Two of the six newborns will be musicals. Admission to all festival events will be free.But if you’re a faithful Charlotte theatergoer — or if you’ve been tracking our theatre scene from afar in Creative Loafing — the names and faces of most of the performers at In-the-Works will be quite familiar.
So why is the revamped festival coming out of its customary home in Booth Playhouse? “I think new work is best evaluated when the audience and the play itself are in the same room,” says Rep producing director Michael Bush. “A formal theater space like the Booth is really looking at something happening in another room that’s separated by that frame. That’s what you do to a picture. You put a frame on it, you put it on the wall, and you say, “OK, I’m ready to be judged.'”
New performance venues will include the Levine Museum of the New South, the Light Factory at Spirit Square, the Mint Museum of Craft and Design, and the Lesbian and Gay Center on Central Avenue. Four of the new shows will have repeat performances later in the festival, but if you want to see the reprises of James McLure’s Calvary or Wendy Hammond’s Absence, you’ll need to hit the highway up to Davidson College.
New Hammond scripts have often been a fixture at Rep’s new play rites. Bush met her for the first time last year at the American Playwrights Project, where former Rep artistic director Mark Woods nurtures the creative process. The Woods connection also introduced Bush to the talents of McLure and John Love. The other playwrights and composers come from Bush’s existing circle.
“I actually think it’s about relationships,” Bush insists. “It’s about investing in a writer that you believe in whether you think this piece is the one or not. These are writers and talent that I believe in over a long-term period of time. Even if in this play festival it doesn’t turn out that this is the one play that I feel is right for Charlotte Rep to produce, I still want to support them as writers. So hopefully down the road, they will deliver a play to me that I do want to produce.”
While Rep is somewhat hamstrung on its choice of performers for mainstage productions — under its LORT contract, the company must hire Actor’s Equity members — Bush is looking toward forging more relationships with Charlotte’s homegrown acting and singing talent. Some of the local actors and singers who make their Rep debuts holding scripts and scores during the next two weeks could be making Rep mainstage debuts as early as next fall.
The inaugural In-The-Works ends on May 1 with a single performance of Bonnie and Clyde at Booth Playhouse. But what about that newly outlawed frame? Bush is toying with the idea of seating the audience onstage at the Booth with the actors and musicians.
Here’s the lineup:
Calvary by James McLure – A small-town Southern lawyer defends an unrepentant racist criminal during the 1950s. The lawyer’s path is further complicated by his feelings for an African American woman and by small-town politics. The cast includes Randell Haynes, Kim Watson Brooks, Jim Gloster, Terrell Dulin, Polly Adkins, and John Hartness.
April 21 at 6pm (Levine Museum of the New South), April 27 at 3pm (Davidson College ).
Absence by Wendy Hammond – The bond of love formed between Peter and Mary is tested by family, politics, espionage, Mormonism, and cooking. That strong bond holds — for 50 years, anyway — unique yet universal. Mark Scarborough and Nicia Carla, square off in this two-hander.
April 22 at 6pm (The Light Factory at Spirit Square), April 26 at 1pm (Davidson College).
The Succulent Walk by John Love – Winner of two CL acting awards, plus a special 1992 citation for achievement in performance art, Love brings his latest one-man performance piece home. Walking Love’s Walk, we follow the journey of a man whose shattered psyche assigns myth and persona to details he encounters during his daily walk — on the fateful day he loses his mind.
April 23 at 8pm (Mint Museum of Craft & Design), April 30 at 8:45pm (Lesbian and Gay Center, 1401 Central Avenue).
Will’s Women by Amanda McBroom and Joel Silberman – McBroom delivers a one-woman musical that explores the crises of a writer who she finds herself blocked, both emotionally and artistically. Who does the author of “The Rose” turn to for inspiration and advice? Enter the heroines of William Shakespeare.
April 27 at 6:30pm (Mint Museum of Craft & Design), April 29 at 6pm (Levine Museum of the New South).
All of the People, All the Time by Patrick Cook – A pet project of Rep’s Michael Bush for the past two years, People/Time is custom-tailored for two topnotch up-close magicians: Darwin Ortiz and David Roth. We follow the co-stars’ progress toward the Mecca of close-up magicians: The Magic Castle in California. Aside from the obligatory sleight-of-hand bravura, Scott (Fully Committed) Helm and Lane Morris Coates supply the character-acting magic.
April 28 at 6pm (Main branch, Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg Co).
Bonnie and Clyde by Michael Aman, Oscar E. Moore and Dana P. Rowe – As we all know, the notorious Barrow Gang were just a bunch of young folk who went looking for fun during the Great Depression, knocking over banks and similar hijinks. It’s a two-year crime spree crying out for a contemporary soundtrack of line dancing and killer country music. Rep’s literary manager, Aman, delivers the goods with his cohorts. Dennis Delamar, Deborah Rhodes, and Patrick Ratchford are among the blue-chip belters who help out.
May 1 at 7pm (Booth Playhouse, after 6pm Closing Ceremony).
David Mamet’s Speed The Plow launches InnerVoices at new facility innervoices plows aheadChances are, in the topsy-turvy universe of David Mamet, that the most elusive of his titles, Speed-the-Plow, was perversely given to his most accessible satire. I saw the original Broadway production, arguably Madonna’s finest hour, and was pleasantly surprised by the lightness of Mamet’s touch and the sunny coherence of both plot and dialogue.The tasty script proves the perfect vehicle for launching the innerVoices Theatre Company at its new base of operations. While the Central Avenue Playhouse doesn’t exactly pop out at you, productions such as this make it well worth seeking out.
We begin — and end — at the office of Bobby Gould, the newly promoted head of production at a major Hollywood studio. Into his lap, courtesy of his old crony Charlie Fox, falls a can’t-miss package with a bankable star.
But in the middle act, Bobby goes head-to-head with a hot temp secretary, trying to win a $500 bet with Charlie on whether he can score with her. The tables are turned — presumably with some pillows and sheets — when the ambitious Karen convinces Charlie to green light a film based on a visionary novel that he was according a mere “courtesy read.”
Mamet keeps two elements of his suspenseful tale deliciously ambiguous: Karen’s sincerity and the relative merits of the two film properties. InnerVoices executive director Carver Johns preserves the ambiguities and the comedy, but in the role of Bobby, he delights in fracturing the dialogue, emphasizing the false starts and repetitions that are Mamet’s hallmarks.
Michael Simmons proves to be the perfect companion in this fractured idiom as Charlie, switching from hideous comb-over to hideous wig between Acts 1 and 3. Serena Ruden is seductive enough as Karen, but she misses the toughest facets of the opportunist and needs to speed-the-pace a smidge. Production is very slick for a new facility, much belying the drab impression of the building’s exterior. Right behind the White Rabbit Bookstore, between Hawthorne and Pecan, innerVoices has created a new theatre Wonderland.Up in NoDa, Off-Tryon Theatre Company has trotted out its strongest dramatic effort of the season, Never the Sinner. Using techniques that prefigure the more celebrated Gross Indecencies, playwright John Logan recreates another “trial of the century,” the Leopold-Loeb trial that shocked Chicago in 1924. It’s clear that Logan wished to probe the motives of this heartless crime and sound the issue of applying the death penalty to such obscenely young defendants. Director Glenn T. Griffin, however, is more preoccupied by the relationship between the youngsters and their infernal pact. For agreeing to become Loeb’s accomplice in crime, Leopold gets Loeb for his sexual partner.
Bradley Moore, last seen at OTTC in the title role of Dracula, brings the same mesmerizing magnetism to Richard Loeb. His smug conceit finds its match in the finely shaded portrayal of Nathan Leopold, Jr., by Joseph Baez, reigning CL Newcomer of the Year. Their chemistry made my flesh crawl.
The trio of trial reporters — played by Stuart Williams, Kristen Jones, and Jonathan Ewart — double nicely as key witnesses. Either because they were under-rehearsed or over-directed, Myk Chambers as defense attorney Clarence Darrow and John Hartness as prosecutor Robert Crowe had some stiff, tentative moments. Neither marred the overall impression, which was quite powerful.
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2003.
