Every summer now we have a handful of talented playwrights from all over the country flung at us in the LaBute New Theater Festival, the harvest of a connection between William Roth, a founder and the artistic director of the St. Louis Actors’ Studio, and the prominent writer of plays and films and director of both, Neil LaBute. This year we have four short plays by seasoned writers and, as always, one by the eponymous honoree.
I particularly enjoyed the ambiguities in J.B. Heaps’ “One Night in the Many Deaths of Sonny Liston.” Again we have an eponymous character, the world champion heavyweight boxer, now in retirement, and a very attractive and a little strange young woman who has been sent by acquaintances of Liston’s to deliver him a present. (The rules of the festival limit the casts to four characters – most get by with two – plus a compact one-act, and acceptance of the limitations of the small Gaslight Theatre stage.) The young woman claims not to know of the man’s fame, but would the people who sent her not have explained something about him to her? Costume designer Abby Pastorello has given her a white dress, for purity or, given the way she adjusts the slit skirt, for something else? Is she the gift, or is the white powder she cooks up on a spoon and liquifies in a hypodermic needle the gift but that she chooses not to share when he offers? Eileen Engel makes the young woman quite fascinating in several ways: an angel of death? Reginald Pierre explores both the hurt and the pride that Liston feels for his role as the bad Black boxer, never accepted by white society in the way Ali and others were. Director Kari Ely kept things well balanced.
Engel plays another very fetching young woman, with more emphasis on the young, in Bryn McLaughlin’s The Blind Hem. She is a former student of Anthony Wininger’s professor, and the bedroom setting and bedroom clothes suggest the relationship may have started before she graduated. She wants it to continue. He’s not sure; his marriage is in trouble, and at one moment he slips off his wedding ring. But it might not be best for either of them. And she is fetching. Ely also directed this one.
And Ely directed “The Mockingbird’s Nest,” by Craig Bailey, a touching and sad piece about a mother and daughter. Jane Paradise is the mother, Daisy, and Colleen Backer is the daughter Robyn. At first, daughter cares for mother, helping her remember what fades, including how a robin’s nest and its brood inspired the mother to name her daughter. Then all reverses, mother cares for daughter, and the nest changes to the one in the title.
John Contini directed “Da Vinci’s Cockroach,” by Amy Tofte. Laurel Button, eccentrically costumed, and Colleen Backer in a museum discuss, also eccentrically, the cockroach in a Da Vinci.
And Contini directed LaBute’s “Safe Space,” that quiet time and place in a theatre before the play begins. But this time a Black man, Reginald Pierre, and a white woman are seated beside each other. He is somewhat offended, because the play has been advertised as being especially for a Black audience. She may be the only non-Black person there. So they politely circle the usual racial circles, she the more voluble one, he increasingly resentful, until they reach that closure, the question of whose people have suffered the most at the hand of white racists. LaBute makes the stage live, as usual, but we’ve been to most of these places before.
Patrick Huber, as always, has come up with sets that meet what’s needed and that shift swiftly under the disciplined hands of Stage Manager Amy J. Paige and her crew, enriched by Kristi Gunther’s lights. Jenny Smith designed props, and the two directors designed the sound, giving their actors a little boost for the moods of their pieces. Joseph M Novak is the Technical Director.
The St. Louis Actors’ Studio’s LaBute New Theater Festival is again a showcase for St. Louis theatre talent and for stimulating drama.
—Bob Wilcox
Photo by Patrick Huber
From the left, Colleen Backer and Jane Paradise in The Mockingbird’s Nest.
