Recent Stories with tag elizabeth heffron

Annex fields a large, capable cast for "Her Mother Was Imagination." (Photo: Ian Johnston/Annex Theatre)

Her Mother Was Imagination (at Annex Theatre through August 28), the dystopian satire from local playwright Elizabeth Heffron and collaborators Ellie McKay (director), Max Reichlin, and Daniel Worthington, is at war with many things, one of them being my desire to laugh all the way through the play. It's a fitfully entertaining fever dream, never settling on being either satire that leaves a mark, a timely cautionary tale about the world to come, or an affecting allegory about women's restricted choices.

At $15, you're getting more than your money's worth, except in lumbar support. The play stretches to two and a half hours so that it can fit all its targets in--Beck, LDS, eugenics, climate-change deniers, elderly patriarchs, young men who are dicks, whacked-out revolutionary feminists, subservient artists--but as the play progresses, the satirical impulse that fueled its opening number is sapped by earnestness.

From sketchy scene to scene, the energy level varies, and an unwonted sense of profanely dramatic importance grows, as if Will It Blend had tried works by Margaret Atwood and Mamet. Heffron's knack for dragooning historical figures (see Mitzi's Abortion, New Patagonia) into hilariously effective duty hasn't deserted her, but here her imported personages are made mostly of straw.

A raucous opening pageant retells how the prophet Glenn Beck (complete with mythologizing, homespun song, right out of "The Ballad of Davy Crockett") withdrew from public life as a "TV soldier" to the upper reaches of an empty high-rise (the WaMu tower, apparently). Beck's mask is on top of someone's head (none of the press materials notes who plays what role), so that when the actor's head is lowered, Beck's beady-eyed grin comes at you like a battering ram.... (more)

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.