Young Playwrights Festival
Teenage troubles are in perpetuity redundant, which can make for painfully universal theater. How many times can you hear about hating your parents’ divorce, or being too fat or thin, or waiting for your first kiss, or how your best friend died too young? But the works chosen for this year’s festival demonstrate a keen, wonderfully mature understanding of history, language, and relationships.
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It’s a shift that’s come about not necessarily because new stories are being told but because they’re being told in a new way, a way shockingly dissimilar from that of just 15 years ago, when irony-laden smirks were fine-tuned watching John Hughes films and pouting to Echo & the Bunnymen. The annual Marilyn Bianchi Kids’ Playwriting Festival at Cleveland’s Dobama Theatre, which I saw then, is a case in point: the plays were rife with adolescent angst straight out of a high school literary magazine, addressing the end of the world, furious social divisions, substance abuse. Yet kids back then saluted these problems with Judy Blume-style domestic grief in small, personal works.
The other two plays address what it means to be Jewish; both are directed by Jeff Ginsberg and Susan Padveen. Tichye Krakowski’s And After the Fire asks: if a flower grows in Auschwitz, is there life in Auschwitz? Filled with obscure references and Hebrew phrases, this play goes bravely looking for God and finds answers that belie Krakowski’s youth. With a nod to the stylization of Robert Wilson, Krakowski doesn’t back down from addressing Nazi horrors, employing much browbeating and carefully calculated choreography. Marvelously set against a backdrop of fences wrapped in barbed wire and draped with the dead’s clothing (here, as in the other works, Julie Lutgen’s set design is picture-perfect) and haunted by Steve Mezger’s sound design of traditional music, the play shows concentration-camp victims as pawns in the hands of Jewish prophets asking: is God just or evil?
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Michael Brosilow.
