It’s spring, reclusive writers everywhere are emerging from their writing rooms, and what better way to celebrate than with Acorn Productions’ annual festival of local playwrights? For the fifth year in a row, the Maine Short Play Festival presents a baker’s dozen of one-acts written by our friends and neighbors. Reviewed here are four of the plays that will repeat, in various configurations, over the course of the weekend at the St. Lawrence Arts and Community Center. Some of the themes that have possessed these proximate playwrights over the last year include love, loss, and sex, explored with the help of such timeless conceits as trees, flowers, trains, and the personals section.
In Richard Sewell’s Oakfall (directed by Harlan Baker), season and mythos are both ripe for the cutting. Sara (Muriel Kenderdine) is getting on in years, and now her childhood home, where she’s lived all her life, is poised to be transfigured by time and a chainsaw-happy young grandson. Earnest and brash young Annie (Kellie Gardner) isn’t happy about it. She and Sara commune about the passing of time, the vicissitudes of human relations, and — as Annie puts it — the “tree shape in things.” The play’s imagery is also rife with pickings, windfalls, cuttings, burning slash, and the impulse to teach trees to walk. This feels a bit too rich at times, and the series of twists is a little overtended, but Sewell’s script is classic, whole, and warm.
There are some horticultural lessons in store for a guy who gets personal with a florist in Dana Pearson’s The Visiting Hour (directed by Jen Widor). Sean Demers plays an uptight guy who comes into the hospital flower shop to buy a bouquet for his brother in the trauma ward; Hannah Legerton plays the lovely florist who teaches him the care of flowers. They talk of tragedy, consolation, and the needs of African violets, and as they do, things stir. In places, the metaphor feels a bit floral, but elsewhere zings with wit and irony. Demers and Legerton are particularly well-cast — his angular height and edged delivery are both foil and dovetail to her soft and luminous candor.
Moving us from botany to the more jarring motifs of trains and vibrators is Linda Griffith’s The Trains of Painesville (directed by Jen Widor). The manically entertaining Stephanie Ross plays a lesbian finding ways to deal with being left, at Christmastime, by her blonde bombshell lover. Some of her methods include replaying old phone messages, ordering a dildo online, and brainstorming a lasciviously sarcastic personal ad. Griffith’s script balances rapid-fire, caustic high comedy with some startlingly low moments of despair. This script, and Ross’s no-holds-barred range, makes for a rather disconcerting ride as our heroine reveals stories of mysterious laments and death by train, with a crescendo accompanied by sound man Denis Nye’s disturbing train soundtrack.
