Off the Shelf and On the Stage: One-Act Festival (Onstage Repertory Theatre, B8 Theatre Company; "Live" in Martinez, CA, July 26, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I just returned from a six-day vacation in Martinez, California to visit his mother Edi and experience a surprisingly rich creative arts presence for such a small town. On successive nights we went to a community film screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 film Lifeboat, a local theatre presentation called Off the Shelf and On the Stage: One-Act Festival, and a quite good local blues-rock trio called Howell Devine. This is a review of the live theatre presentation I wrote the day after Charles and I saw it.

Last night (Friday, July 26) my husband Charles and I went to the Campbell Community Theatre in Martinez where we’d been the night before to see the program of seven one-act plays we’d hoped to see, only they were doing a film screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat instead. The show’s whole title was Off the Shelf and On the Stage: One-Act Festival, and it was a co-production of two local theatre groups called Onstage Repertory Theatre and B8 Theatre Company. (Multiple groups use the space, not only for plays and film screenings but concerts as well.) There were seven plays on the program, though the whole evening clocked it at just two hours (with a 15-minute intermission) and so some of the works were more just skits than one-act plays. The opener was called “Randall and Ward Attend the Theatre,” written by Rom Watson (that’s how it’s spelled in the program), directed by JanLee Marshall and featuring Alan Cameron as Randall and Michael Garrahan as Ward. It’s set in 1981 (the date becomes highly significant at the end) and the characters are Randall, who’s what used to be called euphemistically a “confirmed bachelor,” and Ward, who’s married to a woman but is really Gay even though he hasn’t actually had sex with Randall. There’s enough of an emotional connection between them that they’re celebrating their fourth anniversary outside the small theatre where they met, and are preparing to go again even though they really don’t particularly like the company or the plays it produces, because it’s sparsely attended and therefore they can sit in a box at the back and hold hands during the performance. The significance of the date becomes apparent at the end when AIDS rears its ugly head (back when it was still being called “the Gay plague”) and they comment about how lucky they are that they haven’t done the down ‘n’ dirty, at least not with each other! Next was a fantasy called “Lighted Fools,” written by Bridget Grace Shealf and directed by Annie Potter, about a queen (Toneia Hawkins, the one Black person in the cast – and I liked the irony of whoever cast it making the Black person the authority figure and the whites her servants and courtiers) and five courtiers, servants or whatever gathered around her. The gimmick is that the queen decrees that, “As of today there shall be no yesterday,” and then because there is no longer any yesterday she can’t remember how to undo her decree.

Next up was a play that hit particularly close to home for me: “Good Morning, Miriam,” written by Jacquie Priskom and directed by JanLee Marshall. The reason this hit home was because it’s about Ari (Mitchell Vanlandingham, who’d also been in “Lighted Fools” and whom I found quite sexy even though he’s short, stocky and not that conventionally attractive), who’s an in-home caregiver for Miriam (played by Pam Drummer-Williams as an older woman and Tori Thompson as her younger self). Audrey (Asha Sundararaman), Miriam’s daughter, wants Miriam to sell her house and move into a nursing home/”assisted living facility” or whatever the au courant euphemism is, but Miriam is understandably reluctant to go even though she keeps forgetting, among other things, that her husband Carl has been dead for 10 years. That was, quite frankly, the high point of the evening for me. The next play, and the last before the intermission, was “Annabel Lee,” an intriguing musical adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem written by Jim Maher and co-directed by Randy Anger and Todd Drummond. It featured Stefanie Suzuki as Annabel Lee, Calem Hough as her lover (identified as “Poe” in the program) and Michael Garrahan as “Seraph” and “Usher.” I liked the elaborate 19th century costumes Suzuki and Hough wore but didn’t care for the musical setting; somehow Poe deserves something scarier than soft rock! Act II began with “The Female Gaze,” written by Christine Benvenudo and directed by Alan Cameron, in which five women – Louelle (Annie Larson), Frieda (Pam Drummer-Williams), Zoe (Tori Thompson), Janice (Sara Delphine) and Candance (Peg Keffer) – are in an art museum looking at Grant Wood’s 1930 painting “American Gothic.” I’m familiar with “American Gothic” from various reproductions and I’ve long thought it was one of the ugliest and meanest paintings ever to acquire a major reputation, and the characters looking at it here pretty much agree with me. They speculate on whether the long-suffering and visibly put-upon woman in the painting is the man’s wife or his daughter (or maybe both, since one of them guesses he made her his incestuous sex slave following the death of her mother in a plot twist that headed for V. C. Andrews’ territory), whether the model for the man was Wood himself or his dentist, and how this painting compares to Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” The punch line for the sketch comes when another woman enters, looks at “American Gothic,” and literally screams, assuming the pose of the character in Munch’s painting.

After that, at least for me, the quality of the plays took a major nose-dive. The next piece was called “Fishing,” written by C. C. Cardin and with no director credited, a monologue by Mark Hinds (also the general manager of the Campbell Theatre) about an already elderly man recalling taking fishing trips with “Pops,” who turns out to be not his father but his maternal grandfather. He recalls how “Pops” died and how scared he was when the body in the coffin at the funeral didn’t look much like “Pops” as he remembered him. Before that he remembers his troubled relationship with his father, who was always pressuring him to “make something of himself,” and at one point gave him a new state-of-the-art fishing pole and creel – which he used once, caught three fish in a short space of time, then threw it into the water and went back to the crude wooden home-made one he and “Pops” had used. The punch line – and it was a good one – came when we heard a woman’s voice from offstage saying, “Gramps? Are we gonna go fishing?” The last piece on the program was called “In Between Songs,” written by Lewis Black, directed by Eddie Peabody and centered around the first two songs on side two of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It’s about three old codgers, Chaz (Jerry Motta), Ed (Wayne McRice) and Grace (Annie Larson), listening to the Dylan record – which for some reason magically stops between “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Bob Dylan’s Dream” – and reminiscing of the good old days of the 1960’s. I suppose that hits close to home for me because I’m 70 years old and I grew up in the 1960’s, and it’s a sign of my advanced age that I can relate to three old people sitting around a record player listening to an old Bob Dylan album and, among other things, wondering what he’s doing now. (He’s making albums of 1930’s standards which he was never qualified to sing even during his 1960’s vocal prime!) But it was a pretty dreary play (Charles thought so, too) and the weakest on the program – though it was also the only one that had been professionally staged before, in New York in 2008. (Some of the other pieces had had staged readings before, but these were their first full productions. I know that because I had a chance to talk to the woman in overall charge of the production afterwards, and I asked her the background of the plays.)