The Maine Playwrights Festival turns 17 this year, and rings it in with angels, hurricanes, and an escapade in the bathrobe of Eleanor Roosevelt. Acorn Productions once again presents the world premieres of new plays by Maine playwrights — five plays, this year, selected from a record 62 submissions — under the direction of four local directors at the Portland Stage Studio Theater. As in past years, the festival has also named a playwright-in-residence, to assist with the workshopping of selected plays; this year it is the marvelous and virtuoso Callie Kimball, whose Dreams of the Penny Gods will be staged as part of the festival this Wednesday. With Mike Levine producing and Daniel Burson again at the helm as the festival’s artistic director, and continuing the last few years’ trend of producing only five or six shows, the 2018 MPF is nicely streamlined, rich in variety and wit, and stylishly staged.
Jonas Werner and Tracey Hall in Travis G. Baker's "Boy Missing."
The fest opens with two haggard drinkers at a bar talking around a traumatic disappearance, in Travis G. Baker’s Boy Missing. Jerry (Jonas Werner) has barely looked in the direction of Darcy (Tracey Hall) before she lashes out, “Don’t you even say a fucking word to me.” As the two shadow-box around and finally at the heart of the sad matter, Baker’s script is admirably allusive and restrained, rich in discursive leaps, the sidelong or unfinished phrase, and the unsaid. Its exposition — about family, prostitution, addiction — comes in nice loose brush strokes, and overall the script gives its affecting and well-cast actors lots of room to develop their characters via physical nuance. Tension levels escalate and release bracingly in Baker’s well-crafted script, and director Lindsey Higgins does some super blocking work moving the two actors over the length of the bar, beautifully pacing the characters’ tensions with proximity and distance, approach and retreat.
