Sketchbook X Collaboraction
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A few of the nerdier pieces in the festival’s lineup actually reference the exponent’s mathematical function, often using repetition to tease out literal and figurative implications of raising a given quantity to a certain power. In Cory Tamler’s Eighty-Four, for instance, a Pennsylvania town called Eighty-Four is magically squared, or multiplied by itself, so that suddenly 84 nearly identical Eighty-Fours dot the globe. Ira Gamerman’s Play (by Play by Play by Play by Play by Play by Play by Play by Play by Play by Play. No Repetition.) shows a couple chained to each other, repeating the same argument in an endless loop. But there’s also a satire on psychopharmacology, an absurdist seder, a dance set to Nina Simone’s “Four Women,” and a comedy called Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche that’s sure enough about five lesbians eating a quiche. I’d say the theme has a lot more to do with the fact that X is the Roman numeral for ten than with anything else. If this were Sketchbook IV, it could be “Intravenous” (life, death, and the way we connect with one another) and most of this year’s 19 works would still fit in just fine.
Of course, that can undermine other, no less valuable things theater can offer—stuff like a satisfying arc, a sense of focus, and opportunity for reflection. Sketchbook’s relentlessly celebratory atmosphere can wear on the nerves. And sometimes, for all of Collaboraction’s vaunted dedication to daring experimental work, it feels like an avoidance of the serious.
Amid all the noise and frivolity, pieces that show some depth or sincerity tend to stand out. Ira Murfin’s Magillicutty’s—about a waiter’s fistfight with a customer—starts as a kind of pissing contest but deepens with the playwright’s shifts of perspective from the waiter to the man he attacks to the man’s wife, ultimately revealing our frustrating inability to understand the people right in front of us. In When I Was . . ., the talented members of A Red Orchid Theatre Youth Ensemble juxtapose interviews they conducted with adults and their impressions of the grownups in their own lives, providing a guileless and perceptive outsider’s look at adulthood. Finally, Spider in the Attic, with Jessica Hudson as a lonesome, deformed creature who sits alone at a typewriter, pounding out sentences and looking through fading photographs, presents a moving snapshot of memory and loss.
