Saturday evening I attended New Play Project’s most recent show, entitled Eccentricities. For those unfamiliar with New Play Project, you can read about it at their website or in an AMV interview with James Goldberg, one of the co-founders. NPP is a non-profit organization founded by a group of young Mormon playwrights for the purpose of promoting theatre in Utah Valley. Their vision itself is something to admire—that they believe in supporting theatre, specifically theatre that draws upon the unique perspective of the Mormon community—but the way they go about fulfilling their goal is even more remarkable: Every two months, NPP puts forth a theme and invites anyone from the community to respond to it by submitting a 10-minute one-act play that, if accepted, will be performed by volunteers with a series of other short plays. Some of their past themes have been “Beneath the Surface,” “Psalms,” “On the Road,” and “Thorns & Thistles.” Every four months (i.e. every other performance) NPP comes up with a theme that is specifically meant to encourage plays having to do with religious topics.

NPP’s idea is radical, but it’s working. When I first became familiar with the group—a little less than a year ago—they were performing their shows in auditoriums on BYU campus and at local libraries and even in backyards: anywhere they could find a venue. They were having some difficulty getting people to audition and were having to ask actors to take on more than one role in a play. Just in the last several months, however, the group’s excellent organization and advertising seem to have been paying off. They had so many people audition for Eccentricities that they had to turn people away because there weren’t enough roles for everyone who wanted to participate. Also, they recently found a permanent home with the Provo Theatre Company, which has a lovely little theater that allows for more polished productions—lights, music, sound effects, etc.

The plays that were a part of this weekend’s performance were quite good, but before I discuss the plays themselves, I want to mention the introduction James Goldberg gave to Eccentricities before the show. James said that the production we were about to see was an act of faith. Two months previously Eccentricities had been nothing more than a name and a date, and now it was a full production. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment what a remarkable feat NPP pulls off every two months and how faith really is an important part of the process. It made me think back to my LDS literature class when we talked about how writing—or the creation of any kind of art, for that matter—is an act of faith. When a writer puts pen to paper, the writer must trust that the words will come. When a writer publishes a story, it’s an act of faith—that somehow what the writer intended to convey will be communicated to those who read the story. There’s a lot of talk about trusting one’s readers in creative writing courses, but it seems to me that playwriting must be even more this way. Handing a play over to a director and a group of actors who will translate the carefully-crafted script to an audience must require an enormous amount of faith and humility on the playwright’s part.

And now, to give an idea of what NPP’s productions are like, here is a brief overview of the plays themselves, with short summaries and a few of my thoughts:

“Sick Cat” by Adam Stallard

Brent is unusually devoted to his cat, Mr. Snuggles, a devotion that causes conflict between him and his girlfriend, Sandy. With the help of his roommate, Brent is able to trick Sandy into feeling sympathy for Mr. Snuggles and in the process gain an appreciation of Mr. Snuggles’ rather, um, unique attributes, such as his talent of smashing inedible food into the floor with his head.

“Quirky” would be the best way to describe this particular play. The play didn’t go much beyond the quirky level, and the ending wasn’t as strong as I’d hoped, but next to “Codgers in the Night,” this play made me laugh the most. What worked about it was that you never see Mr. Snuggles, but from the frequent discussion of his antics, we learn quite a bit about the cat—that he’s wretchedly ugly and not the most hygiene-conscious of felines, and that he has some peculiar habits. These habits are vividly described and thoughtfully interpreted by the two roommates, who seem to find their pet an endless source of entertainment and fixate on him almost to the point of idolatry. By the end of the play, one can’t help but gain an odd sort of fondness for the imaginary cat, just as Brent’s girlfriend does.

“Sunny” by Katherine Gee

A father and his daughter, Sunny, are driving down the highway in the father’s truck. Along the way, it becomes evident that the father, a truck-driver by trade, knows very little about his daughter and that the two of them have a strained relationship—a fact that the father deeply regrets, though he hides his regrets behind a cheery countenance and boisterous, unending chit-chat.

This play takes on the difficult topic of strained family relationships. The father’s attempts to feel close to his daughter and apologize for his years of absence are both humorous and sad. What didn’t work quite as well for me was that at times the father’s pain manifested itself in such delusional ways that I began to wonder if he was teetering on the edge of sanity, rather than just being deeply pained by his poor relationship with his daughter. Overall, however, it was rather well done and the scene at the end where Sunny hugs her father when he drops her off before hitting the road again is genuinely touching.

“Snowstorm” by Ben Crowder

A group of eccentrics, having been caught in a snowstorm, end up in a motel together and hilarity ensues. The eccentrics consist of an actor who breaks into different accents every several minutes and fancies himself to be something of a lady-killer, a nurse who faints at the sight of blood, a young hypochondriac who is convinced he has the plague, and a married couple—the wife of whom thinks she’s pregnant, though she clearly isn’t. Their amusing interactions and odd antics reach the highest pitch when it’s revealed that a serial killer is on the loose near their motel.

“Snowstorm,” I would have to say, was the most slapstick of the plays–reminiscent of screwball comedies from the 1940s. Most amusing was the accent-shifting actor, Roscoe, played by Rafe Gándola. The focus of the story seemed to be on the eccentric characters themselves rather than a story arc. This may have been something of a weakness because, as with “Sick Cat,” the ending felt a bit like an afterthought. Still, it was entertaining and Ben’s amusing dialogue made me laugh. I wonder what the play would have been like had there been more than 10 minutes to develop the characters.

“High School Reunion” by Katherine Gee

The setting is a five-year high school reunion where a man named Chris has been asked to emcee the evening’s events. Bad jokes and awkward moments fill the first half of the play as Chris recounts memories from high school, sometimes revealing things that oughtn’t to be revealed about other classmates. Toward the end of the play, Chris realizes that he was made emcee as part of a prank to publicly embarrass him and that his other classmates consider him to be a loser.

This play, which was essentially a monologue, with Brenan Cartwright performing as Chris, was extremely awkward and painful to watch. It felt very similar to “Sunny,” Katherine Gee’s other play in this show. Both include characters who are trying to put on a happy face in spite of their insecurities. In “Sunny,” the ending is hopeful, but in “High School Reunion,” the ending is the low point of a play that starts out light-hearted and loses all of its light-heartedness 2/3 of the way through. My impression is that these plays were meant to portray these awkward, loser-ish characters sympathetically, which I think worked.

“Irrational Numbers” by Adam Stallard

A daughter finds it difficult to relate to her mother, who has Asperger’s Syndrome and an obsession with irrational numbers, particularly the square root of two. The conflict reaches a point where the father insists the mother and daughter to go on a hike, hoping that if the two of them spend some time together, they’ll come to understand each other better. The story is couched in a narrative about the Pythagoreans, a group of mystics who had unusual habits and believed the world could be explained in terms of whole numbers.

One of the things that I thought worked in this play was the framing of the mother/daughter story with the narrative about how irrational numbers were discovered. I thought it effective that the daughter told the story of the Pythagoreans, rather than the mother. Through this narrative, the feelings of the daughter become evident—how she begins grudgingly to describe the oddities of the Pythagoreans, which parallel the oddities of her mother—oddities she resents. As the mother/daughter story and the Pythagorean narrative progress, not only do we begin to understand the mother’s obsession with irrational numbers, but we see the daughter beginning to appreciate her mother’s peculiarities and trying to find the beauty in her seemingly irrational behavior. A difficult topic to take on in 10 minutes, but surprisingly successful, I thought.

“Codgers in the Night” by Stephen Gashler

Three inmates at an old folks home, led by the visionary DeLoy, hatch a wild plan to foil the nurses and escape from the home…by walking out the front door.

Stephen Gashler’s play impressed me the most of the bunch. It was a fine bit of comedy, well-written and splendidly performed: Nick Herrick, Christian Cragun, and Rachel Herrick all excelled in their roles as DeLoy, Melville, and Doris, respectively. Gashler’s success seems to have come from carefully choosing a simple story with an interesting setting and characters and then milking each of these elements for all they were worth. I appreciated the attention that was given to detail—both in the dialogue and in the acting. Also successful was the implicit contrast the play made to action movies where heroes escape from prison or the villain’s lair or some other such sticky situation. DeLoy’s donning a tux for his grand escape and his heroic attempts at throwing the nurse off his tracks by putting marbles on the stairs were priceless.

“As Simple as That,” “Smaller Than That,” and “That Simple” by Arisael Rivera

A family consisting of a mother, father, and daughter spend an ordinary evening together at home.

At the talkback session after the performance, Arisael Rivera said that he’s thought of developing this particular play into a sitcom. This was very much the feel of the play. Nothing in particular happens—no major events, but a lot of funny little discussions and interactions take place. Particularly entertaining is the ongoing situation of the father’s concern over receiving his coupon mailer already opened. He later discovers that a postal worker stole some of his coupons, and he’s not sure whether or not he should press charges because he didn’t really care that much about the coupons anyway. Other events include the daughter introducing her Hispanic boyfriend to her parents, and the parents trying to figure out where to get dinner. This play was also fairly successful, I thought, in its development of the characters. This may have had something to do with the fact that it was three times as long as the other plays. I enjoyed watching the interactions of the characters and appreciated Rivera’s ability to find humor in everyday things that happen to ordinary people.

I’ve been impressed with what I’ve seen of New Play Projects’ productions, and Eccentricities didn’t disappoint. I look forward to seeing and reviewing future shows. If any other readers attended the show, please respond with your own thoughts about the play—I’d like to hear other people’s reactions.