A Few Notes on Last Night's 14/48

First of all, 14/48: The World's Quickest Theatre Festival, is still going on (at ACT Theatre, 8 and 10:30 p.m., tonight, and next Friday and Saturday; tickets $20). If you've never been, you should go. If you have been, you should consider going again. 14/48 is a brilliant exercise in the essentials of theatre--seven world premiere plays written, produced, opened, and closed in 24 hours. And then repeat. If it sounds like another tedious exercise in theatresports, it's not. The results are often funny, but the work is just as likely to be moving, romantic, or even disturbing. And given the much-discussed shape of the world in the late aughts--war, despotism, economic crisis--the playwrights assembled responded in stunning form with a night of thematic heavy work based on the theme of "collateral damage."

Paul Mullin's /me misses hyperbaric, a riff on cyber-bullying that tells the story of a web forum where bitchy trolls drive a depressed and lonely man in desperate search of some human contact to suicide, closed out act 1. Then act 2 opened with Joy McCullough-Carranza's Come the Dawn, about a pair of soldiers who accidentally kill a baby while searching a house in search of insurgents.

Then there were two plays about housing and the current economic crisis. Dawson Nichols's Taxi is about a gung-ho young husband out to get the best deal on the housing market, at the expense of a careworn woman struggling to sell her childhood home despite the protestations of her insane younger sister. Elizabeth Heffron's Monique Does the Math is a sort of diptych, comparing the dispassionate conversation of a pair of investment bankers with a young couple being seduced by a deal too good to be true. Nichols takes aim at the venality at the base of American society, while Heffron takes a hard look at naivete of the American Dream seen through the lens of the burnt out vapidity of Wall Street.

The point is, 14/48 last night was great for demonstrating that in only 24 hours, theatre artists can tackle tough issues in a meaningful way. There have been funnier line-ups for sure, but the evening spoke to the quintessential power of theatre that's so often lost in a mix of artful obfuscation and middle-brow pandering. And of course I should mention that there was plenty of comedy, including Scot Auguston's Wichita, featuring a great cast of Troy Fishnaller, Stan Shields, and the lovely Allison Strickland, and Cafeteria Blossoms by Celene Ramadan, directed by one of my favorite up-and-comers, Opal Peachey, and performed by the amazing pairing of Tina LaPadula and Peter Dylan O'Connor.