Review: Program 14 of Chain Theatre's Summer 2024 One-Act Festival Flecked with Intimations of Mortality

Layover at Reagan National

Written and directed by Kate Katcher

Catch

Written by Jeryl Brunner

Directed by Sara Thigpen

Presented by Jesse Eisenberg, Anna Strout, and Barbara Toy

Banshee

Written by John Patrick Shanley

Directed by David Zayas Jr.

Hangmen

Written by Kyle C. Mumford

Directed by Matt Giroveanu

Soured Milk

Written and directed by Annie Raczko

Presented by Chain Theatre

312 West 36th St., Floors 3 and 4, Manhattan, NYC

August 8-September 1, 2024

The Chain Theatre's summer 2024 One-Act Festival gathers a wealth of short-form theater, offering 14 separate programs each comprising two to five plays, with a livestream option available for select dates. In four of the five plays that make up Program 14 in the festival, characters confront mortality, to different degrees and in different ways, in several cases through chance encounters, while the fifth presents a life-changing revelation in a slightly different vein. In scenarios and settings ranging from the everyday to the absurd to the supernatural, the plays in Program 14 enjoyably and affectingly exhibit the tragedy and comedy in what keeps us loving, laboring, and living.

Kate Katcher wrote, directs, and performs in the impactful Layover at Reagan National, in which she is wonderful as one half of a married couple enduring a flight delay at the titular, and perhaps symbolically chosen, airport. The couple are flying in connection with the husband's (Don Striano, also excellent) career as a successful playwright, and his wife, a writer herself, is accompanying him and his deteriorating vision. The blurriness devouring anything close to him acts as an example of losing things that we experience as givens, as fundamental parts of ourselves, that resonates with the play's climax. Before that climax, which is driven by chance on the one hand and cultural forces on the other, the comfortable tangents and emotional ebbs and flows of the couple's conversation artfully establish a lived-in relationship with a foundation of caring partnership underlying any frictions. The show, which includes a jab at how the slurry of news content helps to normalize preventable tragedy, movingly highlights the ever-present contingency that haunts human lives: how one object, one person, one moment, can have an incalculable effect.

Catch, directed by Sara Thigpen, moves us firmly into the comic realm, even as contingency is again foregrounded. Fact-checker and aspiring writer Justine (Jeryl Brunner, also the show's author) worries that a chance meeting with Craig (Jason Kravits) while she was wearing a particularly unflattering pair of jeans has ruined the chances for a romantic relationship with Craig, with whom she has been on a single date (that she thought was successful). This is not their only unplanned encounter: it turns out that Justine consistently runs into Craig–yet his promised calls seem not to materialize. The show mines laughs from Justine's internal monologue in some of these situations, made accessible to the audience through recorded voiceover. It further turns out that Justine has preferred to be alone since she was a child (the combination of overthinking and social anxiety we see in her adult self is surely relatable to many), and Brunner and Kravits make for hilariously realistic kids in the relevant flashback. The reason that she avoided the company of others when young both feeds into and parallels how she acts towards Craig, and it is ironically researching fly fishing, one of Craig's hobbies, that ultimately leads Justine to question her lifelong habit of trying to make herself acceptable to others. 

The eponymous character in John Patrick Shanley's Banshee is considering what amounts to a big life change as well. A banshee (the anglicized form of the Irish "bean," woman, and "sidhe," fairy or spirit) traditionally warns members of a family of impending death. Malcolm (a fantastic Erick Betancourt) doesn't have a family in the sense of a partner or children, but he does have a flu that might just be more serious than he thought. As Malcolm is sitting down with a big bowl of soup that he hopes will cure his illness, his unexpected visitor reveals herself. The banshee, Genevieve (Elizabeth Bays), is tired of sadness and hopes that she can cure that more existential malaise with a half-human baby. This is where Malcolm comes in, though Genevieve's ignorance of how human babies are made may turn out to be a sticking point. Bays brings a spritely physicality and charming mischievousness to Genevieve's mix of childlike innocence and an unsparing relationship to death, and she and Betancourt power a rivetingly funny consideration of what is natural, what it is to try to go against one's nature, and how that figures into what we want and need from others.

Unlike Malcolm, the men in Kyle C. Mumford's Hangmen, directed by Matt Giroveanu, are quite aware from the play's beginning of their proximity to death. In fact, they are seeking out death when they find themselves in a rather absurdist situation that again raises the question of how sometimes it just takes one person, at the one right moment, to completely alter the trajectory of someone else's life. Bruce (Mark Gorham), a middle-aged white man in a suit, climbs a tree–depicted with clever economy using a second performer and a pair of "branches"–before donning a noose for reasons that one can no doubt surmise. However, before Bruce can take the fatal plunge, he is interrupted by an exchange with Omar (David Harrison Pralgo), a younger man of color who has climbed a different tree for the same reasons. As Bruce and Omar talk and even argue, including over who will jump first, it becomes clear that while their circumstances may be different–Omar can't even afford the therapy that Bruce feels has failed him–they share a feeling that no one wants or will listen to them. The characters' wearing nooses while standing at the precipice of death functions as an externalization of a state often overlooked or kept hidden, and what Bruce and Omar make of the commonality in their experience forms part of an ending that further elevates an already funny, poignant play with a pair of felicitous performances.

Finally, with Soured Milk, written and directed by Annie Raczko, we return from worlds of folkloric spirits and suicide forests to the mundanity of a high school faculty break room. Raczko is Barbara, a bluntly assertive faculty union rep at Oak Harbor High School. Barbara's colleagues include Sam (Crystal Williamson), a senior teacher who practically lives at the school, according to her coworkers, and has mentored multiple generations of other teachers, and Cindy (Olivia Whicheloe), whose predilections for yoga, crystals, and healthy eating distract some people from that fact that her commitment to her school and students runs as deep as Sam's. Most the problems faced by these women are prosaic and widespread in education, from insufficient budgets to skyrocketing post-pandemic absenteeism to overbearing, entitled parents (whose overbearing entitlement we hear in voiceovers representing posts in a Facebook moms' group, which, while satirical, are probably not, one imagines, exaggerated much, if at all). The milk of the title, long expired but continuing to occupy the faculty room's dodgy fridge, stands as a symbol of such problems, one more simple, basic thing that's never fixed. The principal, Jake (Josh Bartosch), a former teacher at the school and Sam's former mentee, seems well meaning, but, well, the sour milk is still there. Cindy is drawing the ire of those Facebook moms, which does not bode well for her under the new student evaluation system that Jake has been tasked with implementing, but Sam has been experiencing some significant changes to her health, and amidst all of these developments, for budgetary reasons, Jake has to fire someone by a certain deadline. Soured Milk deals compellingly with aging, solidarity, and, of course, how teachers, underappreciated and under-resourced at every turn, nevertheless commit themselves to their students in spite of obstacles up to and including their own health. Soured Milk, with the help of vibrant, layered performances from its cast, deftly establishes a vivid world that one could easily imagine being expanded into a full-length play.

A little banshee told us that time is running out for this festival, but there is still a chance to sample the more than 50 new plays that it has to offer; and, as more than one play in Program 14 shows us, some chances really need to be seized when they arise.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards