Fresh Ink follies

In Thou Art an Ass, Orlando, one of the four locally written one-act plays on the boards in the Blue Room Theatre downtown, a character, Brandon, reads aloud a scathing newspaper review of a local production of Romeo and Juliet. His wife, Beatrice, who authored the review, looks on.

“Aren’t you being rather harsh?” he asks her. “I’m just being honest,” she replies. “But they’re seventh-graders!” he exclaims. “Details,” she says scornfully.

I can relate to that. The four plays that comprise this year’s Fresh Ink, the Blue Room’s annual festival of one-acts, aren’t high art, either as plays or performances. (I’m just being honest.) But they’re delivered with tremendous enthusiasm, a couple of them are terrific fun, and the others are always interesting.

For the festival, the playwrights had to work within certain constraints. They had only about 15 minutes of stage time and little in the way of props (a barrel, a hobby horse, a table and some chairs) to add to the Blue Room’s black-box stage. In addition, this year they were required to include lines from Shakespeare in their plays to honor him on the 450th anniversary of his birth.

The funniest play was Matt Brown’s Shakespeare in Space, a Star Trek send-up in which the spaceship “Life Transport Vessel D-5,” with its cargo of cultural relics from a long-abandoned Earth, is under assault from “Caligulan dagger worms” that penetrate through the anus and cause “scorching space insanity.”

Among the characters are Dr. Butts (Betty Burns), a mad German ship’s doctor with a Hitlerian moustache; Capt. Dogberry (Kathryn Jackson), a garishly costumed figure who emerges from the barrel, and Patient Lavinia (John Loss), whom the dagger worms have turned into a man with a donkey’s head, greenery growing from his fingers and a celery stick for a penis. If you’re going over the top, might as well go all the way.

Hey, it’s laugh-out-loud funny—crazy costumes, an absurd premise, and actors who can pull it off. Burns is especially terrific, spitting out unds like bullets, and the rest of the cast keeps right up with her. Credit to director Stephanie Ditty for making it all work.

Sean Proctor’s Asap, directed by Hugh Brashear, is also wildly comical, thanks to a scene-chewing performance by the fearless Samantha Perry as Miss Hamlet and a script that has something to do with a weapons-development scheme based on Shakespeare’s characters (there’s a gun that can turn people into donkeys, for example).

There’s also a “tree man” (or, as Miss Hamlet calls him, a “manatree”) who pops up from the barrel. When the “manatree” is shot with the donkey gun, he becomes a “manadonkatree.” Trust me, it’s funny.

Absurdism also rules in Tara Grover Smith’s Resolution (directed by Cal Reese), though with a kind of grim seriousness. The play is set in the offices of a corporation that is developing eyeglasses that increase tech workers’ productivity by recording their eye movements and eliminating those that are unnecessary. The only problem is that the glasses make the eyes bleed.

There are a couple of robotic female employees named Titania and Viola (Jessica Sijan and Cat Campbell, respectively); a male employee named Mercutio (Brett Edwards), who’s writing a novel about corporate oppression; and a boss called Mr. Bottom (Trevor Allen). I’m still not sure how it all fits together, and it was rough around the edges at times, but it held my interest. (I’m just being honest.)

Finally, there was Saralysette Ballard’s aforementioned Thou Art an Ass, Orlando, directed by Delisa Freistadt. This was the most literate of the four plays and also made the most sophisticated use of Shakespearean imagery and lines, but it didn’t stage well. The characters were intriguing (especially the crassly narcissistic Orlando, played by Garrett Miller), but on opening night they didn’t cohere physically.

A good thing about a collection of short plays is that, if one doesn’t work, another will be along soon. All in all, there’s plenty to enjoy is this year’s Fresh Ink festival.