St. Louis Actors’ Studio’s LaBute New Theater Festival has opened. As usual, there’s a new LaBute short play and six other plays from their competition. Also as usual, the Festival is in two parts, each composed of the LaBute offering, this year called Hate Crime, and three of the winners.
Hate Crime is classic LaBute, the layers of the story slowly, carefully revealed to create the constant question in the audience’s mind, what is going on? Here, two lovers, Chauncy Thomas and Greg Hunsaker, are meeting in a hotel room. One already has a partner, but it’s the other one who’s neurotic about leaving no clues to the outside. It’s as mesmerizing as watching a snake, with both actors using fine detail to outline their characters.
On a train platform somewhere in New Jersey, Spencer Sickmann, Reggie Pierre and Ryan Lawason-Maeske are three suits who, per the title of the play, are Waiting for the Erie Lackawanna. Ron Radice is writing theater of the absurd here, so just go with the flow and follow the briefcases. Nice work in particular from Lawson-Maeske with his facial expressions.
After the intermission, Barbara Blumenthal-Ehrlich’s Sacred Space gives us Sophia Brown and Kim Furlow as two observant Jewish women getting ready to prepare a body for burial. It’s the morning after the Pulse nightclub shootings, and the play weaves Jewish tradition with an unexplained, very mysterious occurrence and coping with the awful news from Orlando. Interesting and, at times, difficult.
Percentage America, from Carter W. Lewis, again offers us political theatre, this time with a much sharper edge. Nancy Bell and Chauncy Thomas matched on a dating website and quickly realize truth is more interesting, and elusive, than fiction, whether what they say about themselves or what comes to them via media. It’s not at all incidental that the play is set in Washington, DC. Kelly Schaschl plays, among others, Wolf Blitzer. Very funny, very biting and, of course, very timely.
John Pierson directed Hate Crime, Waiting for Erie Lackawanna and Percentage America; Nancy Bell directed Sacred Space. Deft timing on all these works.
This first section of the festival runs through July 16. The second half opens July 21.
LaBute New Theater Festival, part 1
through July 16
St. Louis Actors’ Studio's
Gaslight Theater
360 N. Boyle
314-458-2978