InterACT: Five Shorts By Five Different Companies

It's one of those events you really wish would have been around for more than a single evening. interACT manifested itself on a number of different stages last night featuring shorts drawn from David Ives' All In the Timing. With five different shorts running on five different stages, it almost felt like a mini cinema multiplex for short, live comic theatre. Audiences benefit a grab deal from this sort of multiplicity and it's an opportunity for local theatre groups to present themselves in a format that opens them up to potential audiences that they might not normally find themselves in the company of.  

There were restaurant samples. Beer. Wine and live music, but I was dedicated to the Ives . . . and actually managed to get through all of the shorts in a single hour. Here are my impressions . . . 

Words, Words, Words

Walk into the Milwaukee Rep's performance space and you found a place without any seating. The floor was littered with pages of script and the occasional flyer for shows running at the Rep. (Nice touch.) The short in question hd Rep interns Lamar Jefferson, Jess Ptichard and Emily Berman playing three primates banging away on typewriters working on a script for Hamlet. . . whatever that might be. Director J.C. Clementz did a fun job of establishing the mood. They had one of the least appealing physical spaces to work in . . . and the general messiness of the physical space made for a really interesting atmosphere for everything to happen in. Costuming was kept minimal, allowing the primate to be delivered entirely by the actors in an Ives piece that is both fun and clever.

Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread 

There was a loaf of bread on the table out front of the entrance to this one along with fliers for The Quasi Mondo's  upcoming production of Robot Cabaret. Looking over the list of companies participating in a performance of All In The Timing, this seemed to be the most obvious pick for Quasi Mondo. Philip Glass Buys A Loaf of Bread is a fun little deconstruction on an exchange between a couple of different people that is presented as a rhythmic abstraction with various echoes of time recurring. Director Brian Rott and company seemed to have understood this one better than either of the other two groups I'd seen try to stage this one. Yes, it's silly and strange, but there's a kind of reality to it that absolutely must be taken seriously. Evan Koepnick managed a compelling performance as the title character in an ensemble that also included Megan Kaminsky, Jessi Miller and Kyle Tikovitsch in another thoroughly satisfying theatrical production staged beneath the Quasim Mondo banner. A few more performances like this and Quasi Mondo will have firmly established a very specific brand identity in and around Milwaukee. 

The Philadelphia 

Pink Banana's end of the program was an interesting mix of talent. I absolutely love that Beth Lewinsky directed this one. A woman as witty as Lewinsky with plenty of experience as a comic actress in sketch and improv knows how to bring something like this across onstage. One of the more straightforward comic bits in All In The Timing, The Philadelphia has tow New Yorkers discussing the "Philadelphia" that one of them has fallen into: a condition in which one doesn't always get quite what they ask for. 

Grace DeWolff casually slipped into a subtle New York accent. She has a smart grasp of the mood and tone of the dialogue and carried it remarkably well. Much of the short is her explaining the premise. Vince Figueroa, who has worked extensively with Lewinsky in the past, played the gentlemen afflicted with the Philadelphia. He was charming as a man who had to come up with a different way of relating to his expectations. Ellen Dunphy rounded out the cast as a waitress having a particularly bad day. 

English Made Simple

Fresh from co-directing A Behanding in Spokane for World's Stage Theatre, Mara McGhee directed this piece for their end of the project. Here the remarkably attractive pairing of Amanda Carson and Matt Roth played out the basics of a conversation between two people with a history together. The conversation is analyzed by a voice over commentary. It was interesting staging . . . there was very little room in the space that the performance was occurring in, but half of the audience could view the short through a window into the performance space . . . which made for an interesting separation from what was going on onstage. Carson and Roth had a fun chemistry that asserted itself through the comically clinical analysis of the conversation between the two people. 

Sure Thing 

The last short I saw of the five on the program was Renaissance Theaterworks end of things--a comic short about a couple of people meeting for the first time. As things go off course for the couple, a bell periodically rings and they pick up from where thing started to go wrong. To a certain extent, this is wish fulfillment, but this is really more the story of how bizarrely improbably it is that two strangers would ever meet and actually fall in love. Directed by Mallory Metoxen, the short featured Joanna Kerner as a young woman reading Faulkner alone while a guy played by Wolfgang Schaefer reaches out to her to try to make a connection. Beyond the surface of the premise, Kerner and Schaefer actually did a really good job of fully realizing two characters who end up moving in some pretty drastically different directions over the course of the short. 

Though it started and ended for me in a single hour, the theatrical portion of InterACT felt very much like a full evening's performance. I really wish there were more shows like this.