| Maine Short Play Festival | March 28 & 29 | $12 | 207.854.0065 |
It’s time once again to bring Maine’s playwrights out of their writing rooms, and to realize their creations on stage. For this month’s eighth annual Maine Short Play Festival, Acorn Productions’ reading committee — producing director Michael Levine, local Equity actor and director Harlan Baker, and Add Verb artistic director Cathy Plourde — chose 12 of the 40 plays submitted by writers around the state. The chosen scripts, each of which runs between 10 and 20 minutes, will be staged this Friday and Saturday, at the St. Lawrence Arts and Community Center.The plays on this year’s slate (directed by Levine, Baker, and local performer/theater educator Julie Goell) represent the work of both returning playwrights and new voices. Festival veterans John Manderino and Michael Kimball return, Manderino with Portrait of the Vampire as a Young Man, which goes existential on desire, and Kimball with The Muffin Man, in which breakfast is deconstructed. Debuts include that of recent USM grad Heather Crocker, withBalcony of a Stranger.
Some playwrights new to the Festival are well recognized playwrights and actors from elsewhere in area theater. The writer/performer team Susan Poulin and Gordon Carlisle, of Poolyle Productions, asks “To exterminate or not to exterminate?” in their script, Yellow Jackets. In actress Cathy Counts’s The Deckhand, a lobsterman and a young visitor share a complicated sunrise trip. Other scripts in the line-up include Gerald George’s Noh-ish adaptation of an old Maine ghost story, in Bailey’s Mistake; Richard Sewell’s Fishtank Poem, Fishtank Song, in which a mother and son spar over fish bowl duty; and the inter-generational vicissitudes of Linda LeRoyer’s My Mother Wears Thongs.
Farce or horror? Find out at the St. Lawrence.
On the Web
Full schedule at www.acorn-productions.org
Related:
The race is on, You'll die laughing, Classics and Shakespeare, More 
- The race is on
Around 7 pm last Saturday at the St. Lawrence, a sealed envelope was sliced open and its contents, handwritten on three slips of paper, were revealed to a full house: “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”
- You'll die laughing
What happens when that levity becomes the modus operandi, so constant that relief actually comes in breakthroughs of genuine grief or anger?
- Classics and Shakespeare
Autumn approaches with a theatrical windfall, so I’ll dig right in, sans ceremony.
- Pass the jelly
It came about “because I knew a girl who wanted to wear a tutu on stage.”
- Home fires
There’s not a samovar in sight, and American playwright Richard Nelson has sharpened and pared down the script.
- Life and death
When the author is David Lindsay-Abaire, what you expect from a play called Rabbit Hole is Alice, not astrophysics.
- An identity crisis
On stage there’s nothing like a bad boy, mugging brazenly like Mick Jagger or hurtling toward comeuppance like a medieval morality play sinner.
- Nixon being Nixon
Nixon’s Nixon is to Richard Nixon what Dante’s Inferno was to Satan, though less sympathetic.
- Short ’n’ sweet
2nd Story Theatre has kicked off its Short Attention Span Theatre with Wave : seven short plays, no waiting; all but one a comedy, so not much time to rest your grin.
- What is normal?
The Gamm has done it again, giving us a performance not to be missed.
- Hot and bothered
Shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater and you get one response. Shout “Die Hose!” (women’s undies) in a German theater back in 1911 and you got another kind of uproar.
- Less
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This Just In
, Entertainment, Performing Arts, Theater, More
, Entertainment, Performing Arts, Theater, Theatrical Plays, Theater Festivals, Cathy Plourde, Richard Sewell, Harlan Baker, John Manderino, Michael Levine, Less
