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Regional Reviews: St. Louis Spectrum 2025: An Evening of Short Plays
Bell Bottom Boos, by Rita Winters of St. Louis, is set on Halloween night 2023, fifty years after the death of a young woman who now haunts the bar she'd left before her sudden demise. Sarah Vallo plays Cindy, the ghost, with Christopher Plotts as a ghost-hunter who knows Cindy regularly reappears there on the last night of October. A goofy bartender (Ethan Perisho) and an intrigued patron (John Pleimann) are each enamored with the red-headed beauty. But her ghost-hunter tries to change the chemistry of it all and coax her out of her lonely orbit. The whole evening seems penetratingly rehearsed and perfectly choreographed, but lacked a bit of confidence during the performance I attended. This seemed to contribute to occasional staginess on the opening weekend. Deb Dennert and Gretta Forrester play old friends who meet again at a funeral in Points of Intersection. It's written by M.K. DeGenova of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. Alice (Ms. Dennert) is the deep-blue feminist, a hard-driving corporate lawyer, and Emily (Ms. Forrester) is the one who gave it up for family life. Suddenly, Alice begins to wonder about the future crowd size at her own funeral, after a life of her own philosophical self-fulfillment. And Emily is caught off-guard, and is forced to defend her own abandonment of self, choosing husband and kids. These high-quality actresses renew a confrontation in us all, in a way that feels spontaneous and caught unawares. In the excellent Stranger Than Fiction, by local writer and artist Marjorie Williamson, a woman (Amie Bossie) is reunited with her playful imaginary friend from childhood (Ms. Vallo). It is an extremely well-constructed examination of a life, set in a bookstore many years after Ellen (Ms. Bossie) has told Pamela (Ms. Vallo) of all her girlish hopes and dreams for the future. It's only the play's premiere, but it already feels like an enduring little epic that wastes no time in constructing an entire human being, full of private but very human disappointments–and Pamela (Ms. Vallo) puts her on the right track again, at last. For some reason I was swept up by Put Me In Coach, by Stuart A. Day of Lawrence, Kansas. I believe it was 50% the garrulous writing, and 50% the nervous, talkative performance of Ms. Forrester as a woman who seizes on the wrong coach at a children's tennis class for some unexpected harassment. But it's not what you think. Ms. Forrester, as Cindy, looks inside the role, all around, upside down, and backwards at it, to great effect. But, opposite her, Mr. Plotts turns out to be a different kind of coach, which only heightens the dizzying neuroses of Cindy. She has a plan to become half of the first lesbian couple to adopt a child in the big rectangular state to our immediate west. And it fills her (and us) with a hypnotizing, babbling kind of panic, for a perfect match of Mr. Day's writing, with Ms. Forrester's acting. Hers is one of my favorite performances of the year so far: endearing and totally vulnerable; idealistic and emphatic. Mr. Plotts proves a very thoughtful scene partner, psychologically drawing pieces of Cindy out, one by one. And the Jenga tower of her fears and defiance teeters on the brink of collapse. The funniest one-act also comes from local playwright/artist Williamson, Silver Lining. Two of our most likable and reliable actresses, Deb Dennert and Ann Egenreither, meet for lunch at a fancy restaurant. Ms. Dennert plays Vera, a budding, 70-something kleptomaniac trying to seduce her longtime friend Charlotte (Ms. Egenreither) into a life of crime. I wish I could steal Ms. Dennert's divine sense of ditziness here for myself. But I'll always be more of an exasperated conformist, like Ms. Egenreither in this light comic role. Girl and Goat, by Belleville, Illinois native Dennis Fisher, is strangely involving, exploring the way religion changes us for good or ill. Ethan Perisho returns (from Silver Lining) as a waiter again, but is also very fine (as this second waiter) as a would-be stand-up comic in a nearly identical restaurant, albeit one with a strangely barbaric menu. Here, Ms. Forrester and Ms. Bossie play a long-term lesbian couple at another restaurant, not to be confused with the restaurant in the preceding play (there is no set designer for this Spectrum, as perhaps you might guess, but there is a prodigious rearrangement of tables and chairs and black boxes by the redoubtable stage managers Carrie Phinney and Kasey Kopp). I don't want to say too much about the plot of Girl and Goat, except that it's well-written and stands apart in a clutch of comedies. The final installment, Just Coffee, is a fresh take on St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, though here it's just a table and chair. Mr. Perisho shows admirable skill as the angel dressed in black with the big black book. A series of mortals enters, each in some varying state of shock or surprise. It's written by St. Louis author Marella Sands and gets nuanced, touching performances from Mr. Plotts, Ms. Dennert, Mr. Pleimann, and Ms. Vallo. I don't know why that type of story still works so well. But Just Coffee shatters our preconceptions over getting into Heaven or Hell. And, as I sometimes say, everyone in town should have a new set of lighting. Just, you know, as a public service program. Merci! Spectrum 2025: An Evening Of Short Plays, presented by First Run Theatre, runs through March 2, 2025, at Chapel on Alexander, 6238 Alexander Drive, St. Louis MO. Admission is free. For tickets and information, please visit www.firstruntheatre.org. Ensemble: Production Staff: |
