If you don’t like the weather in Monterey, just wait a few minutes. This interpolation of Mark Twain also works for Monterey Peninsula College’s New Works Festival.
It presents five short plays, a poetry monologue, and a full-length play – new and original works by locals – all in one package. It’s the product of a theater writing class taught by new Theatre Arts Chair, Teddy Eck, and one of its biggest strengths is variety.
Rules of Engagement (by Deanna Ross) is an anthropomorphic piece about a gentlemanly sandpiper who has a confrontation with a surly seagull on a beach. Ross has another piece, the technically deft What Have You Prepared For Us?, about an audition for a musical from the point of view of the producers.
#NeverReadtheComments (by Kevin Michael Smith, who is the Weekly’s director of digital media – where he does read the comments) is an internet flame war between two people whose anonymity helps fuel their hostility.
The poetry piece is titled “Yeah Yeah Yeah, sure. Fine. I admit it. I love My Cat Into Outer Space” (Abe Holston), and sports lines like “I spar with ghosts and strike rooms like lightning.”
Canvassing (Kristin Brewer), about trying to get giraffes to paint in the wild, might be working on an absurdist level, but following it linearly might be vexing. The same might apply with An Unfamiliar Life (by someone billed as e borg). It’s a Samuel Beckett-like number about two young men who happen to sit near each other on a bench and talk about existence, death, grief and skateboarding.
The script has seeming errors that result in disjointed dialogue that sounds like the way people actually talk, which, if taken literally, can be nonsensical.
Sean: Maybe if she’d driven a different, I mean, just like that, gone, / just gone .
If that’s too nonlinear for you, just wait a few minutes. The festival concludes with the Monterey High School-student produced 86: A Coming of Age Story (Gabriel Bate, Jaeson Lim, Dominic Naccarto), which is as earnest and straightforward as its title. It’s the year 1986 and four good friends are struggling with changes and revelations that could wreck their lifelong unity.
The festival’s performances will be informed greatly by the directors (Linda Temple and Anthony Rodriguez) and actors (MPC and Monterey High drama students). The concept is a sure bet.
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