Some Solid Theatre At This Year’s Extremely Short Play Festival

 

Photo.Andrew Alexander.   Mary Ellis and John Muggleton.

Ottawa’s Extremely Short New Play Festival can always be depended on to yield surprises. To be sure, some entries may prove profoundly uninvolving even even though they mercifully last only a few minutes. But there are always others that yield rich dividends.

Such is the case with the 2014 edition, which continues at the Arts Court Theatre until Nov. 30. As always, director John Koensgen and his actors use a bare stage and the simplest of props. As always, there’s a professional flow to the evening, with one play giving way to the next with a minimum of fuss. And most importantly, the playbill again features a quartet of solid actors — Mary Ellis, Gabrielle Lazarovitz, Brad Long and John Muggleton — giving their all to the material and, in the process, demonstrating their versatility.

Even so, there’s not much that the performers can do with with two forgettable trifles from playwright Yohanan Kaldi. My Best Friend still seems an unnecessary indulgence about prison fleas even though it lasts only two minutes. Kaldi’s second fragment, Ex Libris, shows some promise with its absurdist confrontation between a borrower and a librarian over a book that may or may not exist. It also presents us with the spectacle of Brad Long bravely tearing out pages and eating them. The problem is that it presents us with nothing more than a situation with no real dramatic payoff.

By contrast, Adam Meisner’s tender Blue Fluted Plain travels a genuine arc during its brief time span to tell us a great deal about human despair and human resilience. John Muggleton and Mary Ellis are outstanding as a couple emerging from an unspeakable sorrow and making their first anguished efforts to rejoin the world by inviting another couple over for dinner.

Pierre Brault also comes through. His play, Quartet, is a charming comic miniature about both the perils and occasional rewards of speed dating. All four actors deliver neatly defined characterization, but it’s Muggleton who makes his own special impact.

Muggleton assumes another guise to deliver an unsettling display of filial rage and masculine entitlement in the play, Rasha, by Mikaela Asfour. But we have a sense of witnessing no more than a dramatic incident here rather than a satisfactorily structured piece. Still, in giving us a glimpse of a particular culture seemingly incapable of integrating into our larger social fabric, Asfour holds out the promise of dealing with such issues in a more substantial play.

Despite a similar lack of payoff,  Rosaleen Egan’s Buying Time sustains our attention because of its lurking sub-text  and Mary Ellis’s portrayal of an overbearing shopkeeper with an agenda. But Brad Long’s surrealistic monologue, Dream On, seems pointless and interminable. As for Jessica Anderson’s Submission, there are some sizzling dialogue exchanges between Gabrielle Lazarovitz, as a playwright frantically trying to deal with writer’s block , and Brad Long as her lover — but is this little play really going anywhere?

Stephanie Turple’s A Couple Walks Into A Bar may not achieve a true resolution — but maybe that wasn’t Turple’s intention. And it still has shape and an unexpected social bite, thanks to the fine work of Long and Lazarovitz, as a bickering couple having dinner in their favourite pub, and John Muggleton who begins as the surly waiter from hell end then morphs into someone more sympathetic.

Finally, there is the emotional resonance of Sarah Waisvisz’s LoveOrangesAndHateThePort. It’s a memory monologue affectingly performed by Gabrielle Lazarovitz, and the fact that it chronicles the life and death of a same-sex relationship is less relevant than the fact that the lovers are Jewish and Palestinian, that they believe at the beginning that they are capable of triumphing over the religious, cultural and political divisions threatening them, only to  fail. Along with Blue Fluted Plain and Quartet, this rueful and compelling piece makes this year’s festival eminently worthwhile.

The 2014 Extremely Short Play Festival

A Presentation of New Theatre

Nov 19-30 Arts Court Theatre, 8 p.m.

Matinees No. 22, 29 and 30 at 2 p.m.

Tickets at http://www.eventbrite.ca/e/the-extremely-short-new-play-festival-tickets-14049439251

Plays: My Best Friend by Yohanan Kaldi

Rasha by Mikaela Asfour

Buying Time by Rosaleen Egan

IloveOrangesAndHateThePort by Sarah Waisvisz

Ex Libris by Yohanan Kaldi

Submission by Jessica Anderson

Dream On by Brad Long

Couple Walks Into A Bar  by Stephahie Turple

Blue Fluted Plain by Adam Meisner

Quartet by Pierre Brault

Director: John Koensgen

Costumes: Vanessa Imeson

Sound and Music: Lewis Caunter

Projection Design: Andrew Alexander

Lighting: Pierre Ducharme

Stage Manager: James Fritz

Performers: Mary Ellis, Gabrielle Lazarovitz, Brad Long, John Muggleton