THE OFF OFF LOOP THEATER FESTIVAL
Instead Merc trader, theatrical entrepreneur, and part owner of the Wellington Theater Doug Bragan has produced the festival, which for the first time in its brief history is being run as a for-profit enterprise. Whether the festival will actually make money remains to be seen. But where else could we ever hope to sample the work of 16 different off-off-Loop theaters, served up in four equal portions, with no single play in each four-play program running longer than 50 minutes?
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Such unevenness, however, should surprise no one–off-off-Loop theater is pretty uneven in general–nor should it discourage the curious. A slick, crowd-pleasing festival would have been far worse, because then the producers would have had to ignore a number of wildly inconsistent but still valuable theaters and would have stifled the rest. The great virtue of our off-off-Loop theaters is their willingness to take risks.
Coming on the heels, as it does, of a play about physical abuse, Dan Sutherland’s cruel comedy performed by Prop Theatre about a pair of well-meaning but pushy parents absolutely obsessed with their bright daughter’s future is hard to take. But then I think I, Bobeck would be hard to take under any circumstances. That’s the play’s strength. I, Bobeck, which Sutherland wrote especially for the festival, offers an unflinching critique of the American dream and of anyone who buys into it.
BDI Theatre Company’s production of David VanMatre’s 5 Very Live, though hardly sublime, manages to be ridiculous in a very entertaining way. Which is more than one would expect from a spoof of that most spoofed of topics, TV news. Happily, VanMatre pursues more than mere parody, and his script rises far above the usual TV-inspired comedy. Even when VanMatre the writer is a bit heavy-handed (such as when the newscasters drive a fictional baseball hero, Steve Basswood, to suicide), VanMatre the director and his cast of six sharp comic performers stage the material to advantage. They make the obvious seem subtle, and the subtle seem brilliant. You can’t ask much more of a play based on the vicious rituals of TV-style journalism.
