Beautiful locals Maine Playwrights take center stage BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	The 2005 Maine Short Play Festival. Reviewed: The Mistake, by Phoebe Reeves; Jill and Jack, by John Manderino; This is the Remains of Another Play, by Chris Gyngell; Contradictions, by Charles Arnold; all four plays directed by Michael Levine and produced at the St. Lawrence. Call (207) 766-3386. Also in the Festival line-up: Directed by Tavia Lin Gilbert: El Jefe, by Jason Wilkins; Love on the Line, by Amy Roche; The Sky’s the Limit, by Tim Wilson; The Poorly Written Play Festival, by Carolyn Gage. Directed by Harlan Baker: Panic in the Time of an Insecure God, by Maureen Sullivan; Radio, by David Bunker; The Sand Which is There, by John Manderino.

Make no mistake, we all fall down before Shakespeare, Williams, Miller, and all the rest of the theater’s distant literary behemoths. But don’t we also yearn to know what dramatic havoc is being scripted by all those reclusive people with typewriters in our own towns? Maine’s playwrights are out there, all right, and glory be to Acorn Productions for hauling their work out under the lights. This weekend comes the Fourth Annual Maine Short Play Festival, at the St. Lawrence, which features the best scripts submitted to Acorn’s annual open call. Over four days, 11 plays will be directed by three of Portland’s best-loved and most vital theater folk: Harlan Baker, Tavia Lin Gilbert, and Michael Levine. Overviewed here are the four pieces directed by Levine.

The back story of Phoebe Reeves’s The Mistake is clear enough from the names of its main personae. Eve Paradise (Heather Thomson) is a frazzled stay-at-home mom trying to earn her GED online and juggling a gaggle of kids (represented by worn-out dolls and well-placed canned child sounds), and her husband Adam (Jeremiah McDonald) works at the mint. Their kids aren’t superkids — they cry, pick up poop, and aren’t writing symphonies or anything — and their parents aren’t well-off, but are more or less hanging in there. Then the couple gets a visit from civil servant the Right Hand (the crisp Allen Bergeron), who informs them that Father (Randall Tuttle, a force of creepy benevolence) will soon come to call with his TV show, "Revelations."

Panic ensues. What will Father, a scary conflation of God, State, and Media, make of these kids? It’s a more literal question than you might expect in this ambitious and cryptic little social satire-cum-modern fairy tale.

Jack and Jill inhabit a much more literal world in Jill and Jack, a quick comedy of marital errors and wit by John Manderino. From two stools at opposite sides of the stage, Jill (Tavia Lin Gilbert) and Jack (Paul Haley) engage in the banter, evasion, and existential desperation for which love is so often so useful. Manderino’s script is a great study for two strong actors like Haley and Gilbert, since their confinement to stools means they have to rely wholly on facial expression and inflection to hold our attention. Gilbert’s wry and confident Jill is gradually drained of her loose sass, and her face becomes more and more strained, till she’s pursed and prone to violent blinking.

For his part, Haley is a virtuoso at the facial change-up, and the fun he has with his steady stream of raising, cocking, arching, and narrowing his fine features is nearly as engrossing as watching a master like Buster Keaton. Manderino’s writing is witty and lets the actors run the emotional gamut, and his characters even achieve orgasm from their respective stools before they start talking about the maggots that will one day clean their eye sockets.

As fodder for existential dilemmas, of course, romantic attachments have nothing on the metaphor of the theater itself. The idea has been kicked around more than a few times, and the Acorn festival hosts a new contribution in This is the Remains of Another Play, by the award-winning USM student playwright Chris Gyngell. Lovers Elise (Jennifer Nicole) and John (Evan Charest) enter and meet in eveningwear and a rush of melodrama. Before they have a chance to play it out, though, mystery interloper Adam (Adam Gutsgell) comes on to reveal to the characters that they are, well, characters, and starts flaunting all their most horrid secrets aloud. Needless to say, they don’t take it so well. Gyngell’s script relies a little too much on exposition rather than suggestion to create this limbo — and a Pirandello joke seems a bit precious here — but he’s also written some great comic digs at the sensibility of critics and the academy. When Adam explains to an angry Elise, deadpan, that she’s "only vituperative because the playwright has an innate misogyny," it’s Gyngell’s writing at most sly and energetic, and such moments enliven a theatrical conceit that’s been around for quite a while.

The last of Director Levine’s shorts is Contradictions, a hospital drama by Charles Arnold. Kelly (Anna Gravel) is a young intern working under the older and wryer Dr. Tony Grasso (Randall Tuttle) in an overbooked emergency-care ward. When a destitute addict, hospitalized for a heart attack, turns out to have a wealthy son (Stephen McLaughin) who comes in and throws his weight around, Kelly has her first professional brush with moral and emotional ambiguity.

This earnest script takes the tension, jargon, and parallel inner character conflicts we now associate with ER and proceeds toward the sort of resolution that only flat-lines can wreak.

The efforts and talents of Acorn Productions are among the most dynamic around, and the Maine Short Play Festival is only one of a number of ways that Mike Levine (et al) work to make Maine’s theater an art that’s truly both of and for the people who live here. Come out to the St. Lawrence to say thanks, and to see what those neighbors of yours have been up till all hours typing.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com