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In 2016 the St. Louis Actors’ Studio brought six one-act plays to 59E59 Theaters for the LaBute New Theater Festival. Last year the number was down to four and this year there are only three. Unfortunately, not only has the number of plays diminished, but the quality has gone down as well. Not one of this year’s plays could be called a success, at least not by me.
Neil LaBute’s entry, “Hate Crime,” opens the program. Perhaps to show that he is au courant on the topic of same-sex marriage, LaBute gives us a gay gloss on “Double Indemnity.” We meet two lovers, Man 1 (Chauncy Thomas) and Man 2 (Spencer Sickmann) in a hotel room where they are going over the details of their planned murder of Man 2’s older husband-to-be immediately after their upcoming wedding. Man 1, who constantly bullies Man 2, relishes the details of the brutal murder, which will be disguised as a gay-bashing.
In “Winter Break” by James Haigney, we meet three members of an Episcopalian family. Daughter Johanna (Kelly Schaschl), who has recently converted to Islam and renamed herself Aisha, is about to leave for Turkey where she plans to spend 2 1/2 weeks studying with a Sufi mystic. Her mother Kitty (Autumn Dornfeld) tries to respect her daughter’s choices, but is fearful enough to beg her not to go. Her gay older brother Bailey (Sickmann) is an Islamophobe who, fearing that she is a prime recruitment target for jihadist groups, questions whether she really intends to return from Turkey. The situation is believable, but the arguments are a bit circular. Nevertheless, I found this the best of the three.
“Percentage America” by Carter W. Lewis is the most ambitious play, but unfortunately trips over its attempts at satire. Andrew (Thomas) and Arial (Dornfeld), having met through an online dating site, are having their first date at Arial’s Washington, D.C. apartment. (That a woman would make her home the location for a blind date seemed unlikely to me.) After confessing to several liberties in their online profiles, they become intoxicated with the power of truth. At Arial’s suggestion, they decide to play a game whereby they “decipher” a news story by comparing how it is presented by various media, finding the most likely version and stripping away loaded adjectives to get to the verifiable truth. Somehow this game has an aphrodisiac effect on them. The story they decide to investigate involves an encounter between the president and a teenage girl (Schaschl) in the Rose Garden. The way it is treated by various media outlets of course reflects their biases. What the couple think they discover alarms them and raises questions about the cost of pursuing the truth. The concept is promising, but the treatment is clumsy and the play is twice as long as it should be.
It is disheartening to think that these are the three best plays they could find for this year’s festival. The acting could best be described as competent. I was surprised that the male actors had to do double duty as stagehands between plays. The set design by Patrick Huber is simple and the costumes by Carla Landis Evans are unremarkable. John Pierson directed. Running time: one hour 40 minutes including intermission.
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