James Barry, an MFA student at Smith College, wrote and directed three short plays, all of which were read and performed by Smith students and alumnae on Thursday, Nov. 11 in Mendenhall Center for the Performing Arts.
“Play reading series” turned out to be a misleading advertisement. I went in preparing myself not for a show but for something closer to a table read. I was wrong.
With the scripts in hand and not a set piece in sight, Ulla Collins-Axelson, Adriana Piantedosi, Hero Hendrick-Baker, Gabe Levey and Mary Beth Brooker kept me engaged throughout the performance. The cast performed well without a traditional set, miming actions and entrances from behind music stands. Despite the lack of blocking, the energy and enthusiasm were abundant.
The short plays, 45 minutes to an hour each, “Perpetual Student,” “Off-White” and “These Days,” were packed with over-the-top characters and enough twists to give an audience member whiplash.
“Perpetual Student” was the first play of the evening. Hendrick-Baker (Zoot) and Collings-Axelson (Pete’s Sake) showed marvelous character expression, and Piantedosi (Fuss) was eccentric, with wonderful physicality and presence. The stage directions, read by Brooker, added dry comedy.
“Off-White” was the most somber of the series, focusing on a mother with dementia (Brooker) and her sons (Piantedosi and Hendrick-Baker). The play ended with a dream-like concert with Brooker (Gloria) pulling the audience into her surreal delusion.
To introduce “These Days,” I feel obligated to note that during the short play I tallied eight synonyms for penis and 39 uses of the word “fuck.” Nothing that happened in this short play was expected, including but not limited to the most memorable quote from Levey’s monologue on the enormity of the Elephant’s penis. Hearing that the “girth of the elephant’s cock is staggering” was not what I anticipated hearing on a Thursday night. But then again, nothing that happened in this reading was even slightly predictable.
