The third of the 10 ten-minute plays showcased through Carroll Players’ New Works Festival – the Carroll University entry into World Premiere Wisconsin that I caught Saturday afternoon – aptly sums up the theme of the Carroll festival as a whole.
Isabella Salefski’s Come, Sit, Speak (directed by Jay Nolan) features a self-absorbed human (Kaitlyn Berry) and the put-upon dog she treats like a show pony (George Wager).
But Fluffy has had enough, making clear to Sharon that the world doesn’t revolve around her.
Fluffy also has wants and needs – including genuine give-and-take from a so-called owner who doesn’t seem to understand that any good relationship requires open and honest communication, lest we take the others in our life for granted, losing touch with them and thereby losing a little something of ourselves.
Salefski suggests that if we’d obey a few simple commands we ordinarily reserve for others such as children and pets – if, that is, we could learn to sit still and pay attention to the people and world around us before we open our mouths – our conversations and lives might be better.
Toxic Parents and Damaged Children
As one might expect from a festival showcasing plays and performances by young adults, several variations on Salefski’s theme involve fraught relations – and toxic communication – between parents and children.
Salefski herself directs Bekah Sprouse’s Unfinished Business, in which the ghostly presence of a deceased father (Mark Thompson) haunts a son (Michael Flynn), who resents his Dad for having never been around.
Sprouse’s treatment is light; her script plays as comedy. But watching how much between father and son gets lost in translation – leaving both parties alone even when they’re ostensibly together – also tugged at my heart, as I considered all the lost opportunities to connect that these two will now never have because they didn’t take the time to talk while they still could.
Things turn much darker in the next two plays, which book-end intermission.
In Ryan Rehak’s Seven (directed by Phillip Steenbekkers), various women (all played by Una Fortier) each suggest to Harper (Sergio Flores) that he’s gay – something he himself can’t acknowledge or accept because his homophobic mother had told him long ago that one might as well be dead.
In Jessica Mayer’s Esto Tambien Pasara (directed by Ruth Joy Tuttle), siblings Charli (Anna-Christina Starszak) and Frankie (Flores again) play battleship while the real war rages in another room, where their father is once again hitting their mother.
The three voices afflicting Kipp (Elena Donley) in Grace Stormer’s Sticky (directed by Josh Zielke) aren’t so much parents as surrogates for all those adults who hobble the young by teaching them to be afraid of the world and themselves.
Each of the three naysayers (played by Ashley Gray, Sage Shemak and Avery EJ Hess) is a voice inside Kipp’s head, telling her that she isn’t actually ready for the big step she’s just taken: Moving out from under the parental roof to live on her own for the first time. She’ll fail, this trio of voices tell her.
But she doesn’t.
Banishing the negative voices inside her head, Kipp readies herself for more positive communications with the real, flesh-and-blood people who actually matter in her life, including the boyfriend who is on his way to her apartment to see it for himself and celebrate Kipp’s hard-won independence.
Missed Opportunities
If we don’t learn how to talk with one another when young, we’re apt to miss vital clues (and therefore fail to make life-changing connections) as adults.
Lizzie Sage plays this for laughs in What’s Mine Is Yours (directed by Phillip Steenbekkers), as Bruce (Kaitlyn Berry) blithely assumes that college roommate Kristine (Erica Pubentz) won’t mind Bruce borrowing Kristine’s things; “what’s mine,” Bruce imagines Kristine saying of her things, “is yours.”
Sage suggests that both roommates are at fault for the resulting contretemps; while Bruce’s self-centered behavior confirms the old adage about people who assume, an oblivious Kristine’s failure to pay attention to her roommate’s wants and needs makes matters much worse.
College roommates also occupy center stage in Skylar Campbell’s poignant Fuckin’ Umbrella (directed by Jessica Mayer), in which Oliver (Michael Flynn) can’t quite bring himself to confess how much he loves an oblivious Xavier (Brandon Kocorowski). As Xavier leaves on a date with a new flame, the forlorn Oliver is reduced to leaving a note under Xavier’s pillow.
When such non-communicative collegians graduate into adult jobs, they behave much like the hapless crew in Philip Steenbekker’s Adults in Space (directed by Lizzie Sage), which closed the program.
As Captain Diaz (Gavin Steele) and his crew (Mark Thompson, Anna-Cristina Starszak, and Kylie Larson-Blodgett) embark on a space mission, it’s quickly clear that the crew of Starship Enterprise this ain’t. Think Keystone Cops – or, perhaps, Airplane! – instead.
Everything that could go wrong does – largely because this fab four can’t communicate and is much too afraid to admit how little they know.
Only Connect!
How far might we go if we ventured forth without flying blind, choosing instead to engage in the difficult conversations that allow us to move forward together? The final two Carroll pieces ask this question and propose tentative answers.
In Libby Miller’s Mrs. Moving On (directed by Elena Donley), a formerly engaged couple (Anna-Christina Starszak and James Heal) finally talk through what happened, honoring the affection they’d once had so that they can move on into different and separate futures.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Anna-Christina Starszak was also the playwright who penned Light Switch (directed by Grace Stormer), in which a grieving couple (Kyra Hietpas and Sergio Flores) tries to begin again after a devastating miscarriage.
Initially resentful of each other and isolated by their anger, they take the first tentative steps toward reconciliation by confronting their pain rather than ignoring it.
By play’s end, they’ve acknowledged to each other that they don’t just feel empty, but hungry – not only for what they’ve lost, but also for what they still need and might have. As the lights come down, they’re feeding that reborn appetite for life by puzzling out a recipe and making dinner, together.
To extend the metaphor, one might consider Carroll’s New Works Festival as the first course in a themed four-course meal, involving similar offerings coming your way through World Premiere Wisconsin.
June will be bustin’ out all over with short plays staged under WPW’s umbrella: the Village Playhouse’s 38th Annual Original One Act Festival in Milwaukee (June 9-19); Rotate Theatre’s Mini Fest in Madison (June 10-11); and the CapitalQ Theatre Fest, also in Madison (June 23-25).
I look forward to connecting with all three of them; here’s hoping you can, too. You can learn more about these three as well as all other WPW productions at https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/all-shows/.
The Carroll Players New Works Festival ran for two performances this past weekend and has now concluded. If you’d like to learn more about the various theater artists who made it happen, check out their pictures and bios on Carroll’s digital program at https://www.carroll-players.com/new-works-festival.html.
