Carte Blanche Studios' staging of Kander and Ebb's Cabaret has been extended through the end of August. With the elaborate set for that show still in place, an independent group of actors performed a brand-new drama also set in the 1930s for two performances only this past weekend.
Forgive Us Our Trespasses was an interesting study in what could be done on an existing set with a small budget. Cullen Moll plays a criminal named Dan Granger who runs a tiny town in the South alongside his assistant Bill (Tommy Stevens). When Granger kills a kid named Tommy Dalton (Andrew Voss), Tommy's brother Christopher (also played by Voss) goes looking for him, and ends up in a complicated situation with Granger's wife, Evelyn (Liz Shipe).
Just more than an hour in length, the script is clean, simple and primal, allowing a shrewd cast to give the staging a moody emotional depth. The dialogue may not be completely true to the era, but it's spare enough to lend the actors plenty of room to tell a compelling story. Shipe's performance was particularly good, as she portrayed the desperate life of a woman who ran with '30s-era criminals-a portrayal that has seldom been explored in drama.
