High and lows The annual Women’s Playwriting Festival BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	The 12th International Women’s Playwriting Festival Plays by J.C. Samuels, Holly Hildebrand, and Jennifer Haley. Directed by Brooke O’Harra, Becca Wolff, Vanessa Gilbert. With Gillian Bell, Casey Seymour Kim, Laura Wood, Harmony Boyce, Malik McMullen, Dan Colbert, Robin Fergusson, and Laurabeth Greenwald. At Perishable Theatre through October 30.

High anxiety and low humor can be an existentially entertaining mix, as Perishable Theatre’s 12th Annual International Women’s Playwriting Festival has pointed out to us.

The strongest of the trio of one-act plays this year, culled from hundreds of submissions, is How High the Moon?, by J.C. Samuels and directed by Brooke O’Hara. In it we follow the bus stop friendship of two people whose backgrounds couldn’t be more different but who find they have much in common at their innermost level.

Don’t worry — neither the playwright nor the director allow the melodramatic potential to get out of hand. Diane (Harmony Boyce) is a 15-year-old Minneapolis high school student working to escape her difficult home situation through the power of push-ups and dogged determination. She needs to get in shape for a physical, she figures, so that she can get into the Air Force. Diane badly misses her mother, who she says is in the military and has been away for years.

Her counterpart is Rwandan refugee Habimana (Malik McMullen), a survivor of the massacres of Tutsis by Hutus. He is diligently working on an admission essay for college, which his advisor insists should be more emotionally open. Trouble is, his emotions have been locked away ever since a massacre took his family, an event that his psychological survival instinct has blocked from memory. Eventually, we learn with some impact, he concluded that the two tribes are more the same than different, knowledge not drawn from one-world sentimentality.

Diane wants to become an astronaut and float above the miseries of the world. Habimana has insulated himself from anger over his loss of a similar idyllic state, when he was raising cattle in his homeland. They exchange help. He shouts at her, pretending to be a drill instructor to toughen her up for basic training. She is as aggressive, playing interrogator at his request, trying to get him to remember the hour when he somehow survived.

McMullen does good work accessing the empathy of the young African, but the character is written and presented with limited dimension. In Habimana’s equanimity, we need to see signs of his suppressed rage, however sublimated. Boyce has a fuller character to work with and doesn’t waste the opportunity. Her performance is both the most nuanced and the most powerful of the evening, as she guides Diane’s sturdy psyche through an array of emotional occasions, knowing when to stay for a while and when to move on. (Kudos to director O’Harra, of course.)

The Dog, by Holly Hildebrand and directed by Becca Wolff, is an amusing prelude that tries, sometimes approaching success, to suggest deeper insights into the human condition. We first meet Vicky (Gillian Bell) as a third-grader being indoctrinated by her teacher, Mrs. Chow (Casey Seymour Kim), in the perils of Cold War life. The "duck and cover" drills, with kiddies hiding under their desks from Khrushchev’s ICBMs, are traumas that won’t quit later in life. But most impressive are classroom photos of the Pompeii dead smothered in ash from Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79, especially the pain-contorted dog. "Some of you may look like that too when the Russians drop the bomb," the teacher chirps.

Perishable veteran Kim is quite droll and imaginative, investing an assortment of colorful characters with hilarious individuality. Mrs. Chow is obliviously insensitive, an old man on a train is matter-of-fact in his amiable cynicism, and a guard in an Italian museum is similarly low-key in his womanizing sales pitch. As Vicky, Bell does well at both ends of the emotional spectrum, and Laura Wood merrily scampers about in dog ears as the Stage Manager.

The longest piece is Gone With the Window, by Jennifer Haley and directed by Vanessa Gilbert. The send-up of Margaret Mitchell’s classic 1936 potboiler is funny but much too long for its limited opportunity for comparison. Robin Fergusson is a twinkle-eyed, voluptuous Scarlett and Dan Colbert is a bemused and canny Rhett. In this vaguely allegorical modern corporate America, Ashley (McMullen) is a rock star, presumably to match the charisma of the original’s plantation owner, and the too-good-for-this-world Mellie (Laurabeth Greenwald) is a selfless office temp sent out by a non-profit agency to spread compassion and filing competence to hard-hearted capitalism.

Unfortunately, using Mitchell’s encouragement of go-girl self-reliance in a contemporary business context is done half-heartedly by the playwright, and there is little there in the first place to let the attempt succeed. What takes over is the basic plot arc and characterizations reduced to stereotypes, hardly enough to sustain much more than a skit. The actors are funny with the little they’re given to work with, but lacking a convincing parallel, this is not unlike watching a Saturday Night Live routine performed with the sound off.

Tips of the hat to Perishable for its dedication to experimental theater. Imaginative half-successes or even failures can be more interesting than safe theatrical standards.