Other Plans @ The Fringe Festival
You’ve got to know you’re tempting fate when you decide to call the show you’re staging as part of a festival of more than a hundred, Other Plans. The name sure ain’t sexy, but at least it’s descriptive: This anthology of one-act plays, written by Stephanie Alice Scarpinato and directed by Ty Hallmark, isn’t a total loss, but it’s hardly essential.
Of the four pieces here, three could use another rewrite while the other, And the Meek Shall Inherit, ought to be shelved entirely. Set in a hospital room, Meek concerns two sisters’ squabble over the ownership of a rosary. Bad news: It’s first in the lineup. Good news: It’s the shortest. Note to the stage manager: While we’re all for suspension of disbelief, a show that uses a rosary as its MacGuffin probably ought to have, you know, a rosary as a prop instead of just a set of beads on a string. When a "rosary" doesn't have a cross on the end ot it, you notice. We’re just sayin.’
Next up is Hungry No More, a study of a none-too-bright young woman who settles in at a diner booth to get to work at her ethically dubious new job as a ghostwriter. It's too long by a third and the story goes nowhere after it offers up, quite early, its one meager surprise. But Melissa Schick (as the writer) and Sheri Ratick Stroud (as a waitress driven to distraction by the girl’s yapping), manage to imbue it with some life.
If I Had a Hammer is Scarpinato’s wild, awkward swing at a socially-conscious history play. Set in Montgomery, Alabama in the mid-60s, it takes two gifted actors, Steve Beall and Matthew Cannon, and stuffs their mouths with dialogue so nakedly expository and on-the-nose that were its author around in the 60s, she’d probably have been laughed out of the Leave It to Beaver writers’ room. Son Cannon has been arrested in a civil rights protest; father Beall wants him not to make waves, because that’s not the way things are ‘round these here parts, etc., etc. But deep down, the dad knows that racism is wrong, too! The always-watchable Beall brings, well, his B-game to this C-minus of a one-act.
That leaves That’s Amore, an aren't-families-wacky comedy about a young woman (Grace Anastasiadis, way better than she was in that rosary-that-isn’t-a-rosary play) trying to coax her grandparents out to meet her new boyfriend. It’s the best of the four and not by a little, with Stroud (who was silent in Hungry No More, but talks here -- does she ever) and Walt Smith as the Sicilian grandparents who’ll find any excuse to avoid leaving the house. Yes, we already know from Moonstruck that Italians are passionate, argumentative people with a cra-a-a-zy zest for food, wine and life, but the actors here are all charming enough that you’ll actually want to spend the time with them. Given that That's Amore is last on the bill, that's not nothing, as they say.
So: One clear winner out of four. If you like those odds, then you can make Other Plans to catch this show Thursday at 7 p.m. or Saturday at 4:45 p.m. Both performances are at the charmingly restroom-free Scientarium at 709 D St. NW. Tickets are available online.