Winning words

Perishable's fest brings out the best

by Bill Rodriguez

Joanne Fayan (top) and Jennifer Hays in In the Wild

The Eighth Annual Women's Playwriting Festival, a welcome staple at Perishable Theatre, has opted for evocations and essences in its three winners this year. Nary a kitchen sink in sight. Potential payoff: illumination that it usually takes a poem rather than a naturalistic play to achieve. Potential pitfall: obscureness and distance where the mind and heart need to be touched.

The play that mostly succeeds is In the Wild, by Crystal Skillman, which takes up the second half of the evening. It hits the ground running, hilariously, with two women lost in the woods at night, panicked out of their minds. Played with over-the-top abandon, Betty (Casey Seymour Kim) and Bonnie (Marilyn Dubois) shriek in slasher-flick terror at the forest sounds around them. And thanks to sound designer Peter Hurowitz, the dense thicket of jungle noise amounts to a character itself: growls, gibbers, ooks, roars, a waterfall of nightmare cacophony. Like the playwright's metaphor of life as a dim forest, it makes its case without argument. Kim and Dubois are delightful in their hyperventilating panic, and since director MaryLee Vitale has them play it for laughs, we're given hope.

Once that background is established, we meet woodsman Clarence (PJ Carroll) and Dakota (Joanne Fayan), whom he is guiding and teaching survival skills. (Get it?) The humorous tone continues, not at the prior feverish pitch, although the hitherto protected housewife is in a fever herself -- of lust over the hunky guide. The dialogue is terse and elliptical, just explicit enough to establish her need and his reluctance. There's enticing chemistry between Carroll and Fayan, which leaves an echo of poignancy after it's played for laughs. Clarence describes her husband as just the kind of brash and heedless Type A who would put them together here, when he decides to end the marriage and admire himself for being so generous. Skillman has perfectly summed up the gist of every woman who's been abandoned for some pretty young thing and every oblivious swine who would do so.

Unfortunately, Skillman indulges in an interminable monologue by a "ghost girl" (Jennifer Hays) that Clarence has met atop the next mountain. It's the sort of marching-in-place scene that is its own reason for being, if it is to work, rather than a "story" advancer. But the poetry is too hard to give convincing life and spirit, despite the director's animating the speech to choreographic heights.

The three plays are available for purchase at Perishable in an anthology, so we can see the difference between text and staging. Doing so, we see how an ordinary scene can be made extraordinary, its significance crystal clear, as on-the-money acting and pumping up the volume did for the opening of In the Wild. We can also see the failings.

Directed by Sylvia Ann Soares, the first play on the bill is Caridad Svich's Finding Life, the well-regarded Latina playwright from Los Angeles. It centers around Lili (Sarah Parramore), whom we encounter at age 7 and see again at five stepping-stone ages, lastly at 60. The thread running through the mini-scenes is her development, in terms of emotional significance, as a writer. From the time she has to write "To catch a fish, start by throwing in your line" a thousand times after school, to Lili's improvised imagistic poem at a window, complete with pretentious diction, we see how words have rescued her from the poverty of imagination of her friends. This is the spare, existential ink-brush drawing world of minimalist playwright Maria Irene Fornes, and without commanding acting presences it comes to life stronger in our minds when we read it than on the stage.

Pretty Speeches, by Katerie Morin, directed by Amy Lynn Budd, dwells in a similarly stark mindscape. Shine (David J. Tessier), a political and commercial ghostwriter, is being auditioned by a harsh, demanding businessman named Davis (Michael Cappelli) to pen what amounts to a dismissal notice to his wife Lex (Sharon Carpentier). Symbolism abounds. The controlling Davis is obsessed with an hourglass and sometimes tries futilely to hold his breath before it runs out. His secretary Lot (Kerrie Brown) is deaf and finishes sentences for him. There are some good bits, such as using dance as a measure of a man's character (as in, is he too solipsistic to try?), as a means of control (the guy leads), and as a powerful mode of non-verbal communication (slow dancing ain't so slow at all). My favorite part of this offering is the director's notes in the program, which in its entirety is: "The partner who gives the prettiest speech when the relationship ends is no longer in love."

Yes, that's how we need to be left by such bravely ambitious plays. Absolutely speechless.