Whenever I see a box marked with an arrow and the phrase “This Side Up,” the words strike me as almost poetic in their simple and straightforward instruction. If only life came with such clear signage! It would sure make living easy. But if that box was heavy and turned topsy-turvy with seemingly no way to right it … . What then?
This is the allegory pursued in New Ground Theatre’s latest production aptly titled This Side Up, whose world premiere I attended on August 26. University of Iowa graduate Kit Grassi, who wrote the work, told our opening-night audience that he drew inspiration from his own experiences and those of some friends but then “blew them up 200 percent,” and that having previously written short stories, this is was first produced play.
New Ground Theatre's 2015 Playwrights Festival: One-Acts was, for me, a mixture of "Ha ha ha!" and "What the hell?!" I either laughed heartily during the five debuting works or sat confused as to the points their playwrights tried to make.
Over the years, Davenport's New Ground Theatre has prided itself on the presentation of new works by emerging authors. But this year, even Artistic Director Chris Jansen is shocked to find the company not only producing eight new works in a season, but eight new works - the majority of them by local authors - over a two-night span.
Playwright Lee Blessing's A Walk in the Woods successfully re-creates a sense of the Reagan-era Cold War conflict between the United States and the then-Soviet Union ... at least according to an older friend of mine who also attended Friday's performance of New Ground Theatre's production. However, my theatre-going companion also agreed with me that the play is reminiscent of the film My Dinner with Andre, famed for simply being a conversation between two people in one setting. And Blessing's story is just that - a series of discussions between a U.S. and Russian diplomat sitting, or sometimes standing near, a park bench. For two hours.
While Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart falls into too many theatrical traps - primarily, having major actions described rather than physically rendered on stage - the author avoids one of the most common by making her play's second act funnier and more interesting than its first. While I liked the first act of New Ground Theatre's Saturday-evening production, I enjoyed its second half a lot more, laughing heartily with Henley's characters as they cackled over serious subject matter such as their grandfather's lapsing into a coma.
The Irish accents are so good in New Ground Theatre's The Beauty Queen of Leenane that, during Friday night's performance, it actually took me a while to understand the actors - particularly Susan Perrin-Sallak and Melissa Anderson Clark, who play the mother and daughter at the center of the play. It took me about as long to also understand the reason playwright Martin McDonagh's work has won so many awards, as I found the story a bit slow and dull at first, though it gradually built to a punch that I didn't see coming despite (as I recognized in hindsight) it being clearly foreshadowed.
Thank the theatre gods for Denise Yoder, as her presence livens up New Ground Theatre's production of Anton in Show Business every moment she's on stage. Portraying a handful of characters, Yoder really gets to showcase her range; whether she's playing a somewhat ditzy stage manager, or a race-conscious black woman directing a play-within-a-play, or a self-assured, bad-joke-telling, male underwriter, Yoder's sense of pace and comic timing are flawless. (Her director is a particular hoot, and her aggressively annoyed attitude as the stage manager T-Anne - who grows more and more impatient throughout the piece - is hysterical from beginning to end.)
