by Steve Barnes
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — The effects of deception in its many forms get a thorough and often hilarious exploration in the 11th edition of Barrington Stage Company’s 10X10 New Play Festival, always a winter winner for the company. It runs on BSC’s Boyd-Quinson Stage through March 13.
The concept remains the same: a half-dozen actors perform 10 short plays, each lasting 10 minutes or less, on a neutral set with minimal costumes and furniture to suggest basic locations: a restaurant, a 12-step meeting, a sidewalk, a desert. One of the promises of the 10X10 is that even if a miniplay doesn’t work, it’ll be over in less than 10 minutes. One of the rewards is seeing how much can be accomplished with a single idea and fewer pages than go into a typical college-level essay.
In this year’s collection, all of the plays succeed, ranging from good to excellent. The overall theme, as created by choices of the show’s co-directors — Matthew Penn, a stage and TV director who has been aboard since 2017 and Barrington Stage’s founder and outgoing producing artistic director Julianne Boyd, each directing five plays — is how people respond to discovering they’ve been deceived, whether actively or by innocent mistake.
One of the best entries is “An Awkward Conversation in the Shadow of Mount Moriah,” in which author John Bavoso imagines the father-son conversation that followed the Bible’s account in Genesis of Abraham (Robert Zukerman) being willing to sacrifice son Isaac (Doug Harris) because God told him to.
In “Gown,” mother and daughter (11-year 10X10 veteran Peggy Pharr Wilson and Aziza Gharib, respectively) reveal to the clerk in a bridal store the real reason the daughter is trying on wedding dresses. Gharib returns, opposite nine-year 10X10er Matt Neely, in Ellen Abrams’ “Liars Anonymous,” in which a pair of attendees at the eponymous meeting regale one another with what they swear are absolutely true stories of their lives. To the audience if not each other, these sound suspiciously like plots from “Jane Eyre,” “Pygmalion,” “Casablanca,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “The Wizard of Oz.” Though those classics are never mentioned, the play flatters its viewers with cultural references, none newer than 1962, that older, educated theater patrons will instantly recognize.
“Climax,” by Chelsea Marcantel, compresses a 90-minute romantic comedy into less than 10 minutes. In it, a man and a woman (Neely, Kelsey Rainwater) in their 30s, close platonic friends since college, stand in front of a restaurant while the woman’s husband fetches the car. After the woman admits she’s in a “boring marriage with a good man,” her friend confesses that he’s been in love with her since they met. They contemplate an affair, their moments of rational dismissiveness alternating with fantasies of idealized romance. In a amusing bit, each mood change is signaled by the swelling sound of Henry Mancini’s arrangement of the love theme to Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film version of “Romeo & Juliet.” As the contours of the likely scenarios become so familiar that we don’t actually need to see them, Mancini’s chart-topping strings soar again, then the husband appears, a laugh is had, the play is over.
It’s neat without being pat. Like most 10X10 plays over the years, it doesn’t challenge but will stand up to rigor, should you decide to apply it. The annual festival has become such a welcome tradition that Boyd, who founded Barrington Stage in 1995 and whose final season is approaching this summer, happily announced at Sunday’s opening that an anonymous donor has pledged a $10,000 matching grant to ensure the future of 10X10. Here’s at at least 11 more years.
