By Pat Launer
Get a sneak peek at the future. Well, the future of theater, anyway. The Wagner New Play Festival at UC San Diego is a thrilling look at what young playwrights have on their minds. This year, there are five fully produced world premieres, and one staged reading.
The works are written, directed, acted and designed by the talented, experienced, nationally-recognized MFA students in the Department of Theatre and Dance. Prior Festival plays have gone on to be produced or workshopped at major theater venues in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Louisville, Minneapolis and Washington D.C. The Festival is named for Arthur and Molli Wagner. Arthur, an esteemed actor, teacher and professor emeritus, was the founding Chair of the UC San Diego Department of Drama.
This year’s festival offerings look as exciting and provocative as ever. So far, I’ve only seen one show (the festival runs through April 25), but that one and the rest are very intriguing, with settings ranging from Kenya to the arctic wilderness, the New Mexican desert to post-Katrina New Orleans. There’s something for every theatrical taste: comedy, drama, satire, even a ghost story.
One of this year’s plays has already made its mark: “Second Skin,” by Kristin Idaszak, is the recipient of the 2015 Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and the 2015 Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award. The play concerns a woman who returns home to care for her long-estranged mother, who’s dying. Secrets are revealed and disturbing childhood memories are awakened. The UCSD production was helmed by a guest director, Moxie Theatre founding artistic director Delicia Turner Sonnenberg.
“Borealis,” by Ben Fisher, was the opening night presentation. It’s about a tightly connected brother and sister, who are alone together in Alaska (though we never find out what happened to their parents). Absalom says he has to go away, to earn money so they can get away. Thirteen year-old Cozbi frantically clings to him, but he leaves anyway, off to work on an oil rig in bitter, remote Valdez, Alaska.
Months go by, and Cozbi finally receives a cryptic letter, with half the words crossed out (redacted). A feisty, indomitable spirit, she claws and fights (and axe-wields) her way to the isolated, inaccessible compound and sneaking and hiding and lying; she punches, bribes and threatens her way through the many corporate layers of oil company bureaucracy (armed with a copy of Donald Trump’s book, which provides her with all the corporate doublespeak she needs).
The play has drama, humor, and a bit of suspense, intrigue and other-worldliness. The writing is smart and often funny. But after some wonderful playfulness and an interesting array of character types, the play leaves us flat at the end, making on-the-nose reiterative statements about climbing the corporate ladder, and choosing a paycheck and the mind-numbing repetition of a hateful job, over family, connection and heart. There’s a lot more going on here than that, but the playwright drops us abruptly with a reductive summary.
The production is magnificent, inventively designed and superbly directed, by Jesca Prudencio. At the center is an outstanding performance by agile, thoroughly credible and delightful Katherine Ko, a first-year masters student. The rest of the seven-member cast is versatile and excellent.
This first taste of the 2015 Festival was titillating. If you’re a theater lover and a dramatic risk-taker, you can be tantalized, too.
- The Wagner New Play Festival at UC San Diego continues through April 25, in various venues.
- Tickets ($10-20) and further information are available at theatre.ucsd.edu/season/NPF2015/index.html
Pat Launer is a long-time San Diego arts writer and an Emmy Award-winning theater critic. An archive of her previews and reviews can be found at www.patteproductions.com.
