It’s About Time

Shorts are in fashion this spring on the Orange County scene--not just for the beach, but for theaters putting on plays.

In an unusual confluence, three grass-roots companies opened new short-play productions over the weekend.

* “Six at Eight,” the annual showcase for winners of the O.C.-based West Coast Ten-Minute Play Festival, is at the Vanguard Theatre in Fullerton.

* The Rude Guerrilla Theater Company has launched “Dirty Laundry and Dead Virgins” at its Empire Theater in Santa Ana. It’s an evening of four strange one-act plays by Keith Neilson, a professor of English at Cal State Fullerton.

* “A Short Play Expose” is the bill of fare at Stages, also in Fullerton. Actually it’s two alternating bills of fare, with six plays on one and five on the other--all by local writers who have had little exposure.

The respective producers said this short-play troika is a matter of sheer coincidence. All had different motives for staging theatrical quickies, and said they did it without paying attention to the other theaters.

“Six at Eight” is a matter of tradition. For eight years, organizer Jill Forbath has mounted her West Coast Ten-Minute Play Festival--which involves soliciting entries from all over the country, reading them (this year there were 483), picking four winners and, with the help of the Vanguard Theatre Ensemble, putting them onstage for a four-week run. Besides the four top selections from the contest, this year’s program offers three plays that originated at the Actors Theater of Louisville’s Humana Festival, considered the spiritual home of the 10-minute play movement.

Forbath said death and renewal were frequent themes among this year’s entries; she thinks the millennium pointed writers toward the big issues. And the first-prize winner, she said, is one of the biggest short plays imaginable.

“The Andalusian Dream” by Magdalena Gomez, a Bronx-raised, Springfield, Mass.-based teacher and playwright, crams plenty into its running time of about 15 minutes (Forbath gives some leeway beyond 10 minutes as long as the play scripts come in at no more than 10 pages).

The four-character play offers scenes of spousal rape, mother-daughter incest and a homoerotic pas de deux between two men. The action occurs in real time and in the memory and fantasies of the central character, a young woman named Luisa. The staging calls for flamenco music and various sound effects. The themes encompass the agony of a family, the wounds of ethnicity, the solace and disappointments of having artistic talent, and the toll of the Vietnam War--on a single family and on the national psyche.

In selecting “The Andalusian Dream,” Forbath said, “I was trying to show that the 10-minute-play format doesn’t have to be a skit. It can be something that takes you through an experience, through a life history almost. It doesn’t have to be cute and funny, but something that leaves you wondering and makes you think. I don’t know if people will be intrigued or just confused, but this is an attempt to say that you can stretch this format.”

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Dave Barton, artistic director of Rude Guerrilla, said he usually doesn’t have much use for short plays.

“Most seem unfinished. If something has a really good idea to it, then why not expand it? To my mind, a good one-act is between 20 minutes and an hour.”

But when Neilson sent him “Spindry!” a 15-minute one-act, Barton was smitten. Here, he realized, was a kindred spirit, a possible match for Rude Guerrilla’s out-there sensibility. “Spindry!,” about an unappreciated wife’s tart toodle-oo to dull domesticity, “was so unusual and raunchy that it perked my interest right away,” Barton said.

Next, Neilson sent “Hades’ Bobbin,” a 30-minute absurdist script about a cell of conspirators trying to pick a new leader. “It was really weird,” Barton said. “I told him, ‘I don’t think I understand this play, but it’s intriguing.’ ”

Add in “Answer Machine,” in which a man’s disintegration unfolds via his phone messages, and “The Death of the Virgin,” in which a portrait painter puts his model through his own odd little Pageant of the Masters, and you have an evening of short plays.

For Neilson, 65, the show represents a return to the theater, the passion of his youth, after more than 30 years away. During the 1960s, while earning degrees at Princeton and the University of Chicago, Neilson acted and wrote plays. The Rockefeller Foundation funded a Cincinnati production of one of his works, “The End of the World or Fragments From a Work in Progress.” But Neilson said the demands of family life and making his way in academia took him in other directions.

“My dramatic career fizzled on the rocks of domesticity and all that stuff.”

But after his marriage broke up a few years ago, the Huntington Beach resident went back to his roots. While continuing to teach a full load of literature and creative writing courses, he dove back into playgoing, play writing and acting--including a performance piece called “Play Beckett Play,” which he delivered at a Modern Language Assn. convention in Memphis, Tenn., disguising it as a lecture when it was actually a play about a scholar “so absorbed in Beckett that he disintegrates into a Beckett character.”

“At my age, a lot of writers have hung ‘em up, so I’m really happy, whatever happens,” Neilson said.

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At Stages, occasional evenings of short plays serve as a sort of tryout camp for theater talent, artistic director Brian Kojac said. Developing new work and nurturing local artists is a big part of the company’s mandate, and Kojac sees short-play programs as a way to audition new writers and less-experienced actors.

For instance, Kojac said, he probably wouldn’t inflict two hours of Ryan Boyd on an audience, at least not at this point. But the response to “Blue Bananas,” a Boyd selection chosen for “A Short Play Expose,” could help illuminate whether the play--which Kojac describes as a surrealistic piece about a woman held captive by “this very strange family”--can reach an audience.

“It’s a real trip,” Kojac said of “Bananas,” which he rates the most promising of several scripts submitted by the young Fullerton writer. “I couldn’t tell if I loved it or hated it. I need an audience to tell what I’m looking at. I told [Boyd], ‘You could be a genius or a complete moron and I don’t know which.’ I’m willing to take a chance just to watch an audience watch it. It could be this bizarre piece of theater people will just love.”

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That’s the advantage of short-play programs, Kojac said. If one piece bombs, the audience only has to wait a moment to get its hopes up again. “The great thing is, you’re going to find something you really like in an evening.”

Forbath, the 10-minute-play maven, said short plays do seem to bring out the skewed side of many writers as they try to make an impression in a hurry.

“I think they want to go for the shock factor. When you read 500 [short plays], those are the ones that stick out.”

SHOW TIMES

“Six at Eight 2001: the Eighth Annual West Coast Ten-Minute Play Festival,” Vanguard Theatre, 699-A S. State College Blvd., Fullerton, in the College Business Park. Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays 5 p.m. $13 to $15. Ends May 19. (714) 526-8007.

“Dirty Laundry and Dead Virgins,” Empire Theater, 200 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays 2:30 p.m.; Thursday performance May 10, 8 p.m. Ends May 13. $12 to $15. (714) 547-4688.

“A Short Play Expose,” Stages, 400 E. Commonwealth Ave., Suite 4, Fullerton. Two alternating programs running Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays 7 and 9 p.m.; Sundays 5 p.m. Ends May 20. $12. (714) 525-4484.