Triple Header in the Comic Book Theatre Festival
The Countess and I caught a swell bill of plays in the Brick’s Comic Book Theatre Festival last night. The theme (for me anyway) was Revelations: Seeing Playwrights Act. In Brian Silliman’s Savior, Mac Rogers, author of downtown hits Universal Robots and Viral plays the titular messiah, a junk-food munching, comic book reading slacker whose job turns out to be more important than he ever dreamed. I can’t tell if it’s one of the best one-acts I’ve encountered off-off (I wouldn’t bat an eye if I saw it at the EST Marathon, and I consider that to be the Olympics for one-acts) OR if the actors were so good that they sold it. Rogers turns out to be an actor of rare focus and clarity (on top of humor) — a feat especially impressive given the fact that he downs a pop tart covered in Nutella halfway through the performance. Kristen Vaughan as the supervisor who stirs his torpid ass into heroism is equally affecting in her urgent, touching portrayal. The play posits a very comforting idea for the contemporary audience: yeah, we’re all cogs in a depressing machine, but the actual work that gets accomplished is often of crucial importance. A pro-bureaucrat, pro-”conglomerate” propaganda play? That I liked? Nice bit of work!
Part two of the evening was James Comtois’s Captain Moonbeam and Lynchpin. This is the first time (I believe) I’ve seen Comtois act. He plays a crazy-as-a-bedbug dad who thinks he’s a superhero and then puts a bullet in his brain (that’s him in the pic above). His performance was funny and believable in a broad kind of way — it will hopefully not be taken amiss if I say he was well cast!
The play itself strikes me as a great beginning for something deeper. It contains seeds of tragedy (despite the seemingly wacky premise) and built-in issues more compelling than the question of whether or not his son’s (Jordan Ungerer) later superhero hallucination is real. The flight of a troubled person into fantasy, ending in death? And loved ones left with the chore of mopping up afterwards? That’s as powerful a dramatic premise as there is. It’s latently here and worth pursuing.
A special treat was a short, funny animated film written by Gavin Starr Kendall (when he was in grammar school, I’m guessing). Called the “Confetti Myth”, it presents a student’s Columbine-esque dream of how confetti was invented. Let’s just say that the school-mates who torture him don’t end up in one piece.
You have three more chances to catch this splendid bill. For details on how go here.
