Forty-Second Street Forever
Written and directed by Peter Rowan
Pastiche
Written and directed by Kayla Hense
Over My Dead Body
Written and directed by Esther Caporale
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. Program 12 presents a trio of plays that find characters confronting, resisting, or pursuing change. From
Forty-Second Street Forever's considerations of personal, familial, and neighborhood histories to the funny but probing philosophical musings of
Pastiche and the dark family comedy of
Over My Dead Body, this set of one-act shows takes us through a series of entertaining liminalities.
Forty-Second Street Forever, written and directed by Peter Rowan and played on a bare stage, finds architect Sean (Tommy McFarland) working on the mid-1990s redevelopment of 42nd Street, a process intended to bring the area in line with corporate interests. At the neighborhood's sole remaining grindhouse theater, Sean encounters maintenance worker John (Peter Quinones), who opposes the Disneyfication of 42nd Street and praises the kinds of architectural details in the theater that Sean calls pretentious. John's uniform reminds Sean of someone from his past, and it doesn't take long until this chance meeting brings decades-old family history, both nostalgic and otherwise, to the surface for Sean. And when John tells Sean about a strategy of resistance devised by 42nd Street's displaced shopkeepers, theater owners, and the like, Sean has to decide which side of this tide of change he stands on and how to honor the long-ostracized familial influence that led him to his current career. Change is of course always an uneven process, and, appropriately for an area called Times Square,
Forty-Second Street Forever highlights that times change simultaneously for the better (such as increasing queer acceptance) and for the worse (such as gentrification), the constant being how McFarland and Quinones root their interplay in an understated emotional sensitivity.
Pastiche, written and directed by Kayla Hense, is at once the most mundane and the most unusual of Program 12's three offerings. Consisting of three scenes, "Door," "Train," and "Coaster," it creates a theatrical triptych that uses everyday objects and spaces to access unexpected questions and perspectives. In "Door," for instance, a woman (
Isabel Sanchez) becomes focused on doors as threshold boundaries. What do we need them for? What do we use them for? One answer seems to be power–even an unlocked door allows one a choice of whether to admit another, or not, and when, as the man (DeAundre Addison) whom she draws unwillingly into her questioning finds out. It is not that one cannot pass through an unlocked door before one's knock is acknowledged, but doing so is itself an assertion of a certain power dynamic. The in-between space of "Train" is not a doorway but a train station, where a man (a standout Christopher Pio) falls into conversation with a woman (Paige Flottman, an excellent foil to Pio's unconventional character) waiting for a train to Paris. At first, the woman sees as nonsensical the man's line of questioning as to why people who take trains always return, but over time, he manages to unsettle her–and our–sureties. Finally, "Coaster" drops in on a relationship in an in-between stage–the woman (Elizabeth Cappuccino) stays with but does not live with the man (Alex Falcao) whose attitudes towards furnishings the woman brings under scrutiny. Specifically, the woman, tucked up on the man's plastic-covered couch, wants to know why he purchases (expensive) furnishings such as the couch if he doesn't want them to be used. His defense that furniture is ornamental and that this room is not for regular use anyway raises the question of what these attitudes reveal about their potential future together, as well as about attempts to impose order and stasis on the messiness of life. As the man and woman's positions diverge, Cappuccino and Falcao's performances create the perfect contrast of piercing and prosaic.
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| L to R: Tinna Hoffmann, Edu Díaz, and Edward Gibbons-Brown in Over My Dead Body. Photo courtesy of Edu Díaz |
Over My Dead Body, written and directed by Esther Caporale and based on true events, extends the mix of comic and dramatic that characterizes Pastiche. Over My Dead Body takes place in a home occupied by Carmela (Edu Díaz), her husband, Lambert (Edward Gibbons-Brown), and his brother, Clinton. Carmela disparages Lambert and Clinton as "blue bloods," and, to be fair, Lambert is the kind of person who watches television all day in a vest and velvet jacket with a pocket square. We learn that Carmela is plotting a marriage between Clinton and her sister, Francine (Tinna Hoffmann); but Francine is late, and Clinton is still sleeping. For Carmela, her home is now a stop on way to Hollywood; for Francine, passing through on the way back to her actual life rather than the life Carmela wants for her (and for Carmela's own benefit); and for Clinton, the home will act as a different kind of transitional space. Díaz as the diva-esque Carmela and Gibbons-Brown as the long-suffering Lambert are hilarious in juxtaposition to Hoffmann's grounded Francine, and the casting of drag artist Díaz is paid off in Carmela's linking herself, whether consciously or not, to Norma Desmond and Judy Garland.
Forty-Second Street Forever,
Pastiche, and
Over My Dead Body combine for a rewarding look at the everyday and the existential, the past and the possible. And, it should be mentioned, the festival has some great merch!
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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