10-minute Play Festival
High Performance Rodeo
One thing’s for sure – there was nothing outrageous about this year’s 10-minute Play Festival at the High Performance Rodeo. I can’t decide whether that’s a point in its favour or not.
On the upside, this year’s audience was spared some of the mind-numbingly bad theatre that graced the stage last year, and the groups involved seem to have taken the exercise a little more seriously this time around. Of course, that means that most swung too far the other way and played it safe, producing some very pleasant skits with very pleasant characters telling very pleasant stories. How pleasant.
As with last year’s event, eight local companies were given a line of dialogue on which to base a 10-minute play. They had 24 hours to write, cast and stage the mini-production, including whatever costumes, sets and props they could cobble together. Many of the artists were making a second appearance at the festival, and have obviously learned some valuable lessons from their experiences last year. Most of the plays used their allotted 10 minutes reasonably well, and the evening provided a pretty accurate snapshot of the various talents of the city’s young theatre professionals.
Obscene But Not Heard was back with a slightly more structured production than last year’s stand-up offering. Infidelities (The first play in the algebra cycle) was a twisted Greek myth, complete with chorus, in which our hero, Infidelities, tries to keep his girlfriend, Chastities, in the dark about his tryst with Promiscuous at the Spartan kegger last week. Combining clever writing by Tony Binns with an engaging sense of whimsy in the performance, it was an audience favorite.
Relatively new on the scene but quickly making a name for themselves, swingdog came up with a unique approach to the constraints of the medium. Their Gaunch! created a series of brief vignettes with five characters, using a limited vocabulary of a few simple lines repeatedly shuffled and recombined in new ways. The technique needed another line or two to give it the legs to last the whole 10 minutes, but it was easily the most unusual of the contributions this year.
The new cabaret format is a better fit for the improv nature of the festival, and there was something to appreciate in each offering. The groups seem to have worked the bugs out this year, so maybe they’ll be comfortable taking a few more chances next year. |
