For the past 10 years, the end of each season at Milwaukee’s Renaissance Theaterworks has meant another edition of the Br!NK! New Play Festival. Renaissance, the city’s only women-led theater company, sponsors the festival each year. The theater company administrators invite Midwestern women playwrights to submit their work for consideration. Two playwrights are selected each season to receive the Br!NK! Residency Award — the opportunity to develop and advance their scripts during a week-long workshop with a director, cast and dramaturg. Following the workshop week, the full-length plays are presented as featured staged readings for the public. The festival’s events are free to attend, but donations are welcomed. The entire festival occurs over one weekend in May.
This year’s “winning” playwrights are Karissa Murrell from Chicago (Black Bear Island), and Karen Saari from Madison, WI. She writes plays about her early years in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (Tragedy Sound ).
In addition to the presentation of its full-length plays, the festival also includes a mini-festival of 10-minute plays. This reviewer only had a chance to see the five plays that were selected for this year’s 10-minute festival.
One of the great things about this theatrical effort is its reliance on a predominantly local cast, with a few local playwrights and directors featured as well. A few of the actors appeared in multiple plays, and that quick-change synthesis creates an atmosphere of added excitement and anticipation.
Among this year’s short plays, a couple really stood out. Bouquet Toss by Maria Pretzl opened on a scene which with many women can identify. Two young women, played by Chase Gilbertson and Cara Johnston, appear onstage in identical bridesmaid’s dresses. They are sitting at a small table for two and bemoaning their perennial status as always-a-bridesmaid-never-a-bride. One of them has snatched the bride’s bouquet and offers it to the other bridesmaid, who complains that she is tired of this well-known wedding reception tradition. Playwright Maria Pretzl has a natural gift for dialogue, and this play covers a lot of territory in 10 minutes.
Another offering, Roberta’s Skin by Deanna Strasse, is set at a nudist beach. However, the beach patrol officer (Nate Press) reminds a newcomer (Ashley Rodriguez) that the outmoded term “nudist” has been replaced with “people of skin.” Although Press appears to be completely nude, he is actually standing inside a booth that hides the lower half of his body. Rodriguez, clad only in a towel, expresses her shyness about being completely naked. Their back-and-forth banter is funny and entertaining. At the end, she prepares to drop her towel – and the stage lights immediately fade to black.
The 10-minute play festival’s first entry, Dry Humor by Maeve Elliot, is also the shortest. For some unknown reason, Actor Josh Pohja is running a dry cleaning service in heaven. Many recognizable “celebrities” stop by to pick up their clothes, including Abraham Lincoln (Shayne Patrick), Marilyn Monroe (Vivian Moller) and Ronald McDonald (Mohammad N. Elbsat). Each celebrity’s arrival is a chance for Pohja to make a few one-liners. The play doesn’t add up to much, but it’s a cute, fantastical “slice of life” that is a good appetizer for some of the plays that follow.
