Bruno's Island New Plays Festival

By Avila

Originally published by SFBG, June 16, 2004.
All rights reserved.

Killing My Lobster produces its annual festival of new works, with two one-acts per evening: The Play about the ice Cream and The Temple of Dionysus; and The Listening Room and The Cheever Tapes. 

Program One: The prolific Lobsters (of Killing My Lobster) are back with a second festival of new plays.  In Scott Wolman's dinky, met-theatrical farce, The Play about the Ice Cream, the conventions governing the staging of an absurdist drama are turned on their head when an unruly audience member refuses to suspend his disbelief.  Although Wolman has a wonderfully zany sense of character and setting, and the production includes some funny performances, the whole thing feels a bit sophomoric: playwrights from Shakespeare to Frayn have been sending up theatrical conventions for centuries; its what the playwright means by exposing artifice that counts.  James Venhaus's comedy The Temple of Dionysus also spoofs theatrical tropes with its bathetic take on classical Greek tragedy.  When the aforementioned Greek god of wine and fertility decides to make a comeback, sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll become the foundation of a world religion.  Charismatically staged by Brain Katz, whose use of movement and space imbue the hackneyed sketch comedy-like scenes with fluidity, the play sets off to make a point about modern spirituality but never quite gets there.

Though slightly insubstantial, these two one-acts with mysteries at their core, Emily Lou smoothly directs the story of a stuffy media studies professor (John Wolanske) planning to break the tenure barrier with his assessment of a sensational Internet-generated case involving a security camera, a morgue attendant (Daniel Lee), and a bizarre fetish in Alex Dremann's comedy The Cheever Tapes.  With a New York Times reporter (Emily Helfgot) loudly crashing his course in expectation of a scoop, the prof and his laser-pointer key chain take the class through a detailed reading of the morgue's grainy security video-grainy security-video effect courtesy of a gentle strobe light-unveiling an amusingly ridiculous, gamely acted tale of the unnatural, the supernatural, and the a forensic pathologist's stuttering attempt to be natural around his buxom collegeague (Tonya Glanz) and a room full of feet. 

Next, Alec Tok directs Kevin Shay's The Listening Room, a sharply written comedy about an established rock critic (Leo Lawhorn) who gets an intellectual and emotional dressing-down while being held hostage in his home by an apparently deranged but bitingly intelligent young woman.  Lawhorn's convincing middle-aged critic anchors the piece, which otherwise skirts the absurd, in a well-acted deconstruction of a pop-culture deconstructionist.