Meida McNeal, Felicia Holman, and Aisha Jean-Baptiste in “Price Point”
(Photo Courtesy of Collaboraction)
Collaboraction’s Sketchbook could use a little curation
A program of shorts is the standout at the annual theater fest’s bloated 13th incarnation.
by By Justin Hayford • June 13, 2013
What you want is to see “The Shorts: 9 Destinies,” a program of original seven-minute plays that, unlike most everything else in the festival, is fun, inventive, imaginative, and largely satisfying. It’s got a partylike atmosphere, with live music between pieces and a guy wandering around hawking cheap beer. As the “classic” show for which Sketchbook is known, it’s got an enthusiastic following…
The informality of “The Shorts”—encouraged on opening night by Collaboraction artistic director Anthony Moseley, who urged the audience to get up and wander around during the show if we felt like it—helps smooth over what might otherwise be the program’s greatest weakness: none of these plays has anything to do with any of the others.
The abstract, poetic musings about a homemade dream machine in playwright Chelsea Marcantel’s elusive Everything Is Permitted, for example, couldn’t be more at odds with the cheap, crowd-pleasing stunts that follow in Jenny Lynn Christofferson and Jaci Entwistle’s intentionally lowbrow Theater McGuiver, in which an actor must jury-rig his own escape from drowning while audience members pelt him with balls of wadded-up paper.
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