Bunbury Theater's current offering of six 15-minute plays in celebration of its 15 years entertaining Louisville audiences turns out to be one of its finest -- a real treat to mark the occasion. Entries were submitted from all over the country, and the excellence of the final choices would seem to indicate that overall quality was high, indeed.
Trish Powell, a veteran Bunbury performer and playwright, provides a clever framing device for the evening with the Who Wants to be an Audience? opener she wrote and performs. The play, a take-off on that you-know-which TV show, periodically is stopped for Powell's "audience screen tests" to supposedly cull those who couldn't make the cut for becoming paid professional theater audiences. Such audiences, Powell advises as she seeks to train the crowd, should be "lively but well behaved." Among the no-nos, exemplified by the behavior of audience members Mary (Sharon Cardwell) and Bob (Gerry Renders) are candy wrappers, coughing, and cell phones. Powell pops up between the other plays from time to time to carry out her audience screen tests.
The evening's final play, The Critic, by Joseph Barbara neatly wraps up (well, not entirely) the discussion of theater that Powell's play initiates. Five "actors" and one "patron" bat back and forth their views of critics and how those people affect theatergoers and theater professionals. The arguments and rants, though familiar, are energetically expressed. In Vin Morreale, Jr.'s The Courtship, Harold (Sam Mannino) and Elizabeth (Julie Zielinski) hilariously flirt, love, quarrel, agonize, make up and analyze their quick-change feelings in ways that bring to mind a Woody Allen film.
Janet Jenkins is Linda in Paul Hasten's Brut, a powerful portrait of a sex-damaged, sex-obsessed, 33-year-old woman who never married and hasn't had a date in 15 years. She's on her computer searching for a Bob Smith she once knew who wore the cologne called Brut. The ending is a shocker.
The other two plays, Ludmilla Bollow's Sunset Zoo and Dirk D. Griffin's Plastic Jesus are outrageous and funny. In Sunset Zoo, four eccentric denizens of a nuring home plot and scheme to take their imaginary zoo animals (a gorilla, tiger, elephant, and beaver) for a midnight outing—to the real zoo. (They say they took them to the circus once before after lights out.) The actors, who bear an uncanny resemblance to their unusual charges and just might themselves be the animals aching for the outing, have a high old time with their roles. Richard Neal Williams, Bob Zielinski, David Levy, and Sharon Cardwell Couldn't be better, and I couldn't have liked it more.
Plastic Jesus gives us Dylan (Gerry Renders), a homeless man who won the lottery and whose Plastic Jesus is his talisman. He stumbles across banker Madison (Richard Neal Williams), who is bent on suicide since his wife left him. Their exchanges are such a hoot, you'll surely want to run out and buy a plastic Jesus after this.
