Plays out of the Sketchbook
Ninth annual festival of short works takes ‘New American Fable’ as theme
Short theatre is a forgiving medium, and at Collaboraction’s 9th annual Sketchbook Festival, an expansive celebration of the form, only the hits leave a lasting impression. It’s worth it to see the entire 14-piece lineup, divided evenly between two programs, though four hours on seating built for speed instead of comfort can be rough.
But the reimagining of the Building Stage is just right for the aptly named fest: tiers of free-form benches line the periphery of the room, creating a feeling of theatre in the round. One wall hosts a DJ. Fourteen striking images by local photographers, each inspired by a Sketchbook piece, adorn the walls.
The sketches in turn claim inspiration from the evening’s theme, “New American Fable.” It’s exhilarating as an audience member to be dropped unsuspecting into one disparate landscape after another, and the festival has a wonderfully mixed bill.
That “Spacelab 2030,” an intergalactic body-snatcher tale told entirely in mime, has a more orthodox narrative than half of the festival’s lineup is really saying something. A weaker attempt at straight-ahead storytelling — though it’s told in three parts and backward, as conventionality is a relative thing here — is “Constriction.” There’s real menace in the giddy punk energy of the mostly female cast, tricked out to look like Jem and the Misfits, but the story of four girls who kill their teacher leans too heavily on the collective consciousness of “A Clockwork Orange” and other tales of dystopic mayhem.
Beatrice & Beau || Photo Credit: Phil Dembinski
The most surreal and thinly stretched piece by far was “Kattywampus,” featuring a dancer wearing a giant papier-mache head and a diaper full of colored balls. A more effective visual performance is “Fix Your Teeth, B*tch,” which makes one woman’s dentist visit into an erotic dance of penance and pain. Other standouts include “Birthday Party (Little Fat Charlie),” in which audience members perform the tale of a shockingly dysfunctional 7th birthday party, and “Pseudoephedrine,” which uses a folk-rock chorus and a makeshift trapeze to transform a phone call between exes into a druggy circus act of miscommunication. While “What I Am Supposed to Be” is a flabbily earnest navel-gazer, “Beatrice and Beau” is a brilliantly claustrophobic rendering of a failing relationship. The evening’s comedic high point hits with the ramblings of a mad German marksman floating above the clouds in “Dreaded Zeppelin.”
The festival is just as much a happening as a show. The DJ spins between and before the acts, cold cans of PBR were offered in the parking lot in the interim between shows (that may be an impermanent segment of the evening, but the space is also BYOB), and after the show the audience was invited to mingle with cast members on the dance floor.
They overwhelmingly obliged.
