Theater review: Sketchbook Festival
By Nina Metz
A single father comes home from work exhausted and rallies his son for a dinner of pizza and milk. But the boy’s thoughts are elsewhere, in a land of cowboys and myth and schoolyard bullies. Like photo stills or panels from a comic book, each scene is a moment frozen in time.
A major contribution to Collaboraction’s 9th Annual Sketchbook Festival, William Nedved’s “Kid” (directed by Mark Fleischer) is the most complete-feeling of the 14 plays in this year’s event. A desolate harmonica sets the tone, and the scenes are punctuated by a shuffle-clicking sound that brings to mind an old View-Master. There is a lingering resonance to this story-in-pictures.
A consistent highlight of the theater season, Sketchbook has had different berths throughout the years. The current incarnation has settled in nicely at The Building Stage, and it’s a good fit for an event hellbent on proving that theater is the antithesis of boring.
The individual works top out at seven minutes. This is a celebration of brevity and short-attention spans, and fest director Anthony Moseley has always cultivated a party vibe for the proceedings, with a deejay spinning tunes between each play. (The shows are BYOB; soft drinks and popcorn are on sale.)
The space itself is configured as a black box with the audience seated on tiered, lime-green steps angled around the stage. On the walls hang photos created by local artists to represent each play. I was particularly taken with Ryan Robinson’s astro-man image for “SpaceLab 2030,” a complicated but witty piece of sci-fi mime created and performed by Dean Evans.
There are a few misfires. There always are. Each night, seven of the 14 plays are performed in an ever-changing combination. (The full lineup is performed in back-to-back programs Saturdays, as well as a marathon performance May 10.)
But the standouts stand out. “Who Put the Dead Bird in My Mailbox?” by Sarah Hammond is like something ripped from Found magazine, and The New Colony’s “A Domestic Disturbance at Little Fat Charlie’s Seventh Birthday Party” pulls three audience members on stage to enact a hilarious grotesque, prompted and cajoled by a raucous Greek chorus.
Chelsea Marcantel’s “Beatrice and Beau” is especially good, with a young couple (the terrific Sarah Gitenstein and Michael Salinas) bickering in unison — I suspect the dark comedy will hit uncomfortably close to home for many.
