PlayFest!: Florida 2008

Believe it or not, there is more to Orlando than Mickey. (Not much but there is some vibrancy outside of Cinderella's Castle.) What brought me to the land of the most famous of all cyrogenically-frozen opium addicts was PlayFest! the unimaginatively-named but sufficiently-interesting festival of new plays. Its full moniker is "PlayFest! The Harriett Lake Festival of New Plays," underwritten by the 84-year-old patroness herself: Harriet Lake.

From February 8-17, 2008 the Orlando Shakespeare Festival is hosting three workshops, 10 readings and one full production of new American theater. (For the difference between a reading and a workshop, click here.) John Pielmeier (Agnes of God) gave a keynote speech and offered a master playwriting class, even if the master himself has been under the radar for two decades or so. I attended as a member of the American Theatre Critics Association, an organization I joined in 2002.

One of the three readings I attended during my brief Floridian sojourn a few weeks ago was Missing Celia Rose by Ian August,a sort of southern mystery piece about a charismatic local (the eponymous Celia Rose) who goes missing in the heat of a Georgia summer in 1921. This was one of the most buzzed-about readings of the festival, with rumors of Mr. August being solicited by some Chicago companies for future production.

Trog and Clay took a Beckettian look into an imagined secret life of Thomas Edison and how the AC/DC battle might have played out in the late 1800s. The 27-year old playwright, Michael Vukadinovich, has already been noticed by The New York Times and The New Yorker for some earlier works. Since the PlayFest readings were not open to review, per se, I won't comment on Trog in particular, but keep an eye out for the ascendant Mr. V in the future.

The last of the readings I caught was for Miss Julie: Freedom Summer. Full disclosure: I did not read Miss Julie in college. I know, it's a terrible admission, but while I was working through the Pirandellian canon, I missed Mr. Strindberg's classic. Mea culpa. But my collegiate laziness certainly helped me relish this adaptation by Stephen Sachs. Other playwrights were disgruntled, and rightfully so, that the cast who performed this reading had, in fact, spent five months in full production prior to PlayFest. It was odd to see a production then reduced to a reading, but I found the Americanized and racial interpretation of this classic story of class division excellent.

Keep an eye out for these and other playwrights who make it to PlayFest! 2009. It might be worth a trip to the land that Disney forgot after all.


[Photo above: Amanda Stephen and Trenell Mooring in Missing Celia Rose. Photo by Rob Jones/Orlando Shakespeare Theater.]