Click here to subscribe today or Login.
WILKES-BARRE TWP. — What happens out on the back porch?
If you attend Gaslight Theatre’s evening of one-act plays this weekend or next, you’ll see that a porch can be the place where two neighbors discuss why one has been sneaking over to swim in the other’s pool.
It can be the place where a charming, would-be hobo wishes he could swipe a pie, if only a pie was cooling on the window sill.
It could be the scene of two potential brothers-in-law bonding as one of them tries to organize a Civil War re-enactment and the other tries to get past his penchant for sarcasm.
Come to “Playroom: Back Porch” — sixth in Gaslight Theatre’s summer-time series for which local playwrights previously set stories in a kitchen, a bathroom, an attic, a garage and a master bedroom — and you’ll see seven one-acts. They include “Brothers in Arms” by Dane Bower, “Patres Familias” by Matthew S. Hinton, “Backyard Family Challenge” by B. Garret Rogan, “The Lady and the Tramp” by Michael Pavese, “Safe As Houses” by Rachel Luann Strayer, “Swim” by Emily Halbing” and “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” by Lori M. Myers.
“We are super proud as a company that we give local playwrights this platform,” said Dave Reynolds, who is directing two of the plays.
During a recent rehearsal for “We Don’t Live Here Anymore,” two of the four actors were missing, so Reynolds read the lines for Todd, who is one half of a couple shopping for a new home; and for Elaina, a long-time Jersey City resident who’s resisting gentrification.
Though Elaina describes her old neighborhood as a place where mothers used to live near their daughters and babysit their grandkids, and her house as a place her grandfather had built, she seems more angry than sentimental.
She’s so bitter, in fact, that Mollie Dooley, of Kingston, who portrays a Realtor, and Jay Whymark, also of Kingston, who portrays Todd’s husband, were backing away and stumbling off the porch during rehearsal, trying to get away from an Elaina who, at the moment, was represented onstage only by Reynolds’ disembodied voice.
“Elaina is very menacing,” Whymark said afterward.
Still, his character doesn’t leave the porch without showing her some compassion.
You’ll find more threads of human kindness — and, no doubt, lots of laughs — in the rest of the bill of fare, too, notably in Bower’s “Brothers in Arms.” That one-act introduces a Civil War re-enactor who seems to wish he lived in the 1860s, though he does keep a cell phone turned on in his pocket. He doesn’t ask how you’re doing. He asks “How does the day find you?”
As the action progresses, that character finds himself surrounded by more and more people who seem to be on a different page of their respective history books. If they’ve ever read a history book.
Another one-act, “Backyard Family Challenge,” uses so much improvisation it has seemed like a new production during every rehearsal, Reynolds said.
“It’s terrifying yet exhilarating” to go with about 80 percent new material each time, he said.
To catch all of the constantly evolving dialogue, he added, “people should come to our show eight times.”
For other Life Section stories, click here.
