Here's the thought behind tonight's PURE Theatre's A Perfect Ten show at The Cigar Factory: Compose an anthology out of 10 10-minute plays by different writers. It's an elegant concept.
But life is messy: Work schedules, emergencies and complications eventually reduced the number of plays in the set to eight. The show was "evolving" all the way up to the end, said PURE co-artistic director Rodney Lee Rogers.
Which, in a round-about way, marks the heart of its charm. On a night when the city's other live performance options included Don Giovanni, Amajuba and DollHouse, the ensemble cast over at PURE was putting together a night of risky new work by unknown writers. The show had no promotional budget, only a vague relationship to Piccolo Fringe and didn't even show up on the printed festival calendar.
So of course I wanted to be there. I'm a sucker for the underdog.
And yet... the 6 p.m. show filled everything but the overflow section, and the 9 p.m. show played to a full house. And sure, maybe that had something to do with the large cast... but on the other hand, both of the last two PURE pieces I've attended have been shoulder-to-shoulder hits. One more and it's an official trend...
The roots of this show run as deep as the origins of PURE, which artistic directors Rogers and his wife Sharon Graci founded as a professional company dedicated to the production of new and/or newish work. The couple had considered some kind of showcase for new plays in 2004, but hit on the concept of Thursday's antho after attending a C of C production of award-winning 10-minute student plays.
Most of the plays Thursday were student-written. Each was compentent, and some were quite good. PURE took the best of those student productions, gave them age-appropriate casting, and then staged them alongside short plays by writers who left college behind a few years ago.
The results swung from grim, provocative visions (Rogers' Killing Harvey Griggs and Patrick Sharbaugh's Eight Grand) to several flavors of humor. My favorite: Type Against Type, written and directed by David Mandel, starring R.W. Smith and Sharbaugh as ... themselves.
We also liked the clever and satiric Art for Art's Sake (written and directed by Will Cavedo), and my wife particularly enjoyed the snappy Human Mating Dance (w&d by Samantha Garman), which she acknowledged was probably "a chick thing."
But the most amazing performance of the night has to be Sharbaugh's... if only for sheer endurance. Consider this for a moment: Here's a guy who simultaneously
- Serves as the arts and entertainment editor of The City Paper
- Keeps up an intimidating schedule for attending festival events
- Puts up most of the material at the CP's Spoleto Buzz Blog
- Played a snarky version of himself in Mandel's play
- Directed Smith, Mandel and Rogers in his own script, Eight Grand
Hats off to you, dude. I'm a coffee acheiver, and I get tired just thinking about that kind of schedule. Critic, blogger, writer, playwright, director and actor, all in the same festival. By the way, Eight Grand is Sharbaugh's first produced script.
I'm not saying that I want shows like A Perfect Ten to replace the kind of professional theater that the two festivals bring to Charleston... but I do favor a greater appreciation for this kind of risky work. Here's hoping that A Perfect Ten is the start of something that we'll see every year, only expanded, and maybe printed on somebody's calendar.
I want to see the work of local writers on stage, and an anthology is a great solution. Given a bit wider publicity, more competition and a longer run during the festival, a PURE anthology series could easily become a June tradition.
-- daniel conover
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