Gallery Players Black Box New Play Festival

The Gallery Players' Black Box Festival of New Plays has been an elegantly produced addition to their season for six years now, and this year's edition proved no exception. An ambitious program of 20 new plays (mostly one-acts) performed over the course of four weekends, the physical production by necessity had to be spare, but the uncredited unit set, a set of sliding panels within a false proscenium of textured boxes, served all the plays with a serenely stark beauty, Jonathan Starr's costumes worked faithfully to serve each individual author's intentions, and Christopher Chambers's rep lighting plot was never less than professional, and at times quite impressive given the exigencies of so many productions in so limited an amount of time.

Herewith are capsule reviews of six of the plays done in this year's festival:

A Night On The Moon, by John Paul Porter and smoothly directed by Amy Smith, is a poignant, three-scene dissection of the ladies who lunch (among other things), showing how money, manners and brains don't always ensure acceptance. The ever-dependable Sue Glausen Smith was luminous and heartbreaking and stopped the show cold with her impeccable timing, both comic and otherwise; Patricia Lavin was superbly glacial as a society bitch; and Garry Burgoyne was gracious and charming as the paid escort who turns the tables on them both.

Staci Swedeen's Deux Femmes, Un Homme was a sitcom with an international flavor, a soufflé that left no lasting impression other than Helene Deme Elzevir's knockout performance as a dinner guest who upsets the status quo of a rather obnoxious yuppie couple. Yvonne Conybeare directed with a sure hand, Daniel De Guzman and Erin Kate Howard rounded out the cast with aplomb, and the whole piece, while seeming part of a longer evening, was over before it really began.

Joshua Scher's Flushed was another sitcom, though much funnier. Directed by Joseph Rosswog with one hand on a fast-moving metronome, the laughs and sight gags came with rapid regularity, and the two performers, Rene Poplaski and Jason Lindner, nailed every line and situation with comic assurance. Especially Lindner, who had to perform most of the piece hidden from view, his legs protruding from underneath the door of a bathroom stall, his arm being caught in the bowl of the toilet where he flung his fiance's engagement ring. Even Lindner's legs have remarkable physicality and a comic timing to rival Glausen Smith's.

At 3 a.m. was easily the best production of the evening. Directed with a no-nonsense intelligence by Bradley Campbell that beautifully showcased Jonathan Summey's smart writing and the intense performances from Tiffany Tang and Javier Chang, At 3 a.m. was mesmerizing in its portrayal of the terror a parent can feel when raising children.

Diminished Returns, by Matthew Ehlers, was an amusing roundelay on the effects a romantic entanglement has on the social circle of a group of 20-something barflies. Andy Roth, Garry Burgoyne, and Shannon Mincielli milked every laugh they could, while Ben Turner earned the biggest laugh by merely reacting. Vin Berardi directed with sitcom élan.

Staci Swedeen returned with Good Vibrations, another wispy sitcom that depended on the visual of a rotating purple vibrator for its biggest laugh. Taking place in a small arts colony down a dirt road in Florida on a buggy summer evening, three women share a shrill, bitchy rumination about commerce vs. art, men vs. women, man vs. nature. Despite the charming performances of the ladies (Andrea Alton, Gabrielle Maisels, and Stacy L. Mayer), the play, and Yvonne Coneybeare's wild, WB-style direction of it, left more susceptible audience members scratching ferociously.