Some productions stay in process for years before they are brought before an audience, and that's not always a good thing. Sometimes the rough edges of new work are what give it a distinctive texture, and those features are often edited out during the workshop process, so that by the time a play is presented, there is little to distinguish it from others in the same style.
Tiger Lilly Theatre's, A Night of Shorts happily breaks with that model, and offers up a commendable diversity of satisfying theatre moments that remind us: a script is sometimes at its best when its still a little bit vulnerable.
When you go to a night of new short plays, you expect the quality of the work to run the gamut between the earnestly impressive and the largely unprepared. Happily, A Night of Shorts presents none of the latter, while delivering several of the former. What's more, all of the 11 short plays had moments that worked, were staged competently, and solidly acted. Here I'd like to highlight four pieces that, even without the strong support from the other works presented, made A Night of Shorts worth attending.
The Hardest Part 1
Dialogue between close friends that's meant to portray a lifetime of intimacy is a hard thing to write without resorting to camp or boring long-winded narratives. The Hardest Part 1 written and directed by Asya Mounger avoids these pitfalls while still managing to make us care about the shared lives of two individuals at the moment when their paths are diverging. Having worked closely together on a number of occasions, Raine Palmer and Sakie Marie Harp are natural choices for best friends Lindsey and Lily, and the actresses bring a palpable chemistry to their characters' relationship, keeping the tempo up, and relying on nuanced delivery rather than long emotion-laden pauses for dramatic effect. There are no deep secrets for the characters to reveal here, nothing designed to manipulate the audience into caring more than we can about two characters we just met five minutes ago. Still though, for anyone who has ever misplaced a dear friend through the natural course of daily life, this piece speaks both plainly and eloquently. Perhaps it carries on just a bit longer than necessary, but that's a small complaint to lodge against a piece that otherwise hits all the right notes.
No Props
Normally I don't like plays about theatre or artists. Too often we prescribe more honor and meaning to our chosen vocation than it actually merits, but No Props delivers plenty of solid comedy sans the self aggrandizement. Playwright Harrison Young, teams up again with director Crystal Braeuner after presenting last month's stage combat showcase, Online Fighting at Gibbs High School. With No Props, Young demonstrates his solid grasp of lighthearted theatrical storytelling. Raine Palmer delights as Barbara, the play's protagonist: a frenetic props-based stand-up comedian struggling to keep her career from evaporating mid-tour. She is joined by Ashley Freitag, a veteran member of Tiger Lilly who gives every bit as good as she gets during the fast paced quippy exchanges as she portrays Fiorina, Barbara's exasperated tour manager. As school-aged Latise, Madison Mansouri makes a very strong and funny character choice that warrants more than a few chuckles (and maybe a few slightly disgusted groans) from the audience. It's a solid piece of situational comedy, and displays, in a very concrete way, that Knoxville possesses all the nuts and bolts stagecraft needed to make solid theatre from the ground up. There are a few bits that fall flat, and a couple of moments that could be reworked or cut, but they are few and far between in this otherwise clever and enjoyable work.
