Oh, Svetlana!

Humphrey's New Flame shines at Perishable

by Bill Rodriguez

THE 6TH ANNUAL WOMEN'S PLAYWRITING FESTIVAL. Featuring Svetlana's New Flame, by Olga Humphrey, directed by Rebecca Patterson; Water From the Well, by Jean Tay, directed by Vanessa Gilbert; and Mizz Romaine, by Mary Lou Pilkinton, directed by Pat Hegnauer. At Perishable Theatre through June 21.

The 6th Annual Women's Playwriting Festival is on the boards again at Perishable Theatre, and its three short plays -- from among 320 submissions -- are a wide-ranging lot. A giddy comedy, a whimsical relationship vignette, and an anguished tale of infanticide in contemporary China focus not so much on issues of gender as on the difficulty of getting by.

The best is saved for last: Svetlana's New Flame, written by Olga Humphrey and directed by Rebecca Patterson. It's a very funny and skillfully acted romp through the hotbeds of burning ambition. Svetlana (Elizabeth Quincy, subtly spunky) is newly arrived from Moscow and hot to trot in the land of opportunity. Her dream is to become a fire eater in a carnival, a choice that aptly symbolizes the attitude of recent immigrants with fire in their eyes. And it makes for some snazzy visuals. (No, she doesn't ever actually consume the flame of the torches she waves around -- but then that saves you a second admission price.)

The scene is set perfectly by two carnival-style murals, depicting a Gorey-esque Svetlana being pursued outside the Kremlin walls and also poised with a flaming torch, red hair streaming.

Her chipper, can-do attitude runs through the play like fervor at a tent meeting, even as, waiting for a job interview, she beams from between two gauze pads. (She had been practicing outdoors and the wind kept shifting.) That job is with a carnival freak show, and it is there that she encounters the flame of the title. Ted (an amiable Stephan Wolfert) has towering bushy hair, and when he removes his hat, she is smitten. His act in the side show, you see, is to pound large nails into his head, and there they are in all their gory glory.

American culture and aspirations get additional send-ups by her family. Kid sister Milla (Kira Neel) wants to become a Cosmo girl and learn to take what she wants instead of having to ask for it. Grandma (played with coy hilarity by Susan Bergeron) confuses some words (she says "shit" when she means "yes"), but she manages to communicate her support just fine.

Sure, it's all very facile, but the through line of burning desire sustains the metaphor quite nicely.

The same cannot be said for Jean Tay's Water From the Well, or Jing Shui, directed by festival organizer Vanessa Gilbert. In it there is the spirit and substance of a deeply affecting play struggling to be born out of a wandering and over-extended metaphor. There are passages that sustain heartfelt observations with the illumination of good poetry. But these moments are muted by repetitions that iterate without amplifying, by a wandering dramatic structure, and by a half-hour length with a story that might sustain perhaps half that time, since it is presented with more exposition than action.

As with the rest of the evening, the acting is just fine. A pregnant village woman (Taryn DeVito) was abandoned by her mother, who wanted only sons. Her husband too wants to think about only boys' names, although we can assume he's in for a disappointment. In the same village are Fu (Michael A. Cappelli) and his wife, Qi (Meg Quin). She is also expecting, and their relationship starts out sweetly before it takes a foreboding turn.

The metaphor that winds through nearly every passage is that of water. Earth-born, it satisfies literal and figurative thirsts and cleanses us of the grime of daily living. However, less is always more when an author is trying to ennoble us and, conversely, more becomes tedious and strident, especially when we agree with the sentiments from the outset.

The opening playlette is Mary Lou Pilkinton's Mizz Romaine, directed by Pat Hegnauer. Set in the New Orleans bedroom of a well-to-do invalid, it's an exchange between the bed-ridden title character (Venus Irving-Prescott) and her new caretaker Letitia (Paula J. Caplan). We're supposed to end up appreciating the power the imagination has to unite conflicting personalities. It's 3 a.m. and the irascible Mizz R. keeps insisting that Letitia describe what the man in the street below is doing. Trouble is, there is neither such a man, nor his equally important dog. Eventually, the two women bond after sharing their guilt about having treated their kid brothers abominably when they were children. But the arbitrary reconciliation couldn't ring a falser note if Gabriel floated down tooting his trumpet.