It starts with Leslie Ayvazian’s sweetly comic play “Carol and Jill,” in which the playwright stars as the aging Carol (“I’m about to be 60,” she mutters, shell-shocked.
Short plays for kids series#
But as organized by the theater’s artistic director, William Carden, Series B nicely builds momentum, with works of gradually increasing ambition. “Daughter,” about parents who watch their daughter leave to fight in Iraq, overheats into tedious melodrama quickly. Not every play works perfectly in Series B either. “For the Love of God, Saint Teresa,” Christine Farrell’s Roman Catholic school comedy about a nun disciplining a student, and Maggie Bofill’s “Face Cream,” about a marital spat featuring a wife panicking about wrinkles, have more potential, but they suffer from a dramatic stasis not uncommon in one-acts. Series A includes mostly overlong misfires, starting with Kia Corthron’s pedestrian political drama, “Trickle,” which schematically analyzes the ripple effect of the collapsing economy on ordinary people with the imagination of a connect-the-dots picture book. While the Marathons are typically mixed bags, with evenly divided line-ups of high and low points, the two evenings of five works provide a pretty clear choice. When Jesse, played with hilarious conviction and a hair-trigger temper by David Deblinger, asks the barkeep about the origins of the name of the assassin Sundance, he says that there’s “probably some symbolic reason.” It applies the same brainy brand of self-consciousness that “Urinetown” used to send up agitprop drama. Ribalow’s short play, the last entry of the Series B of “Marathon 2009” at the Ensemble Studio Theater, is a deceptively savvy cultural essay about the mechanics of a beloved American genre wrapped inside a pitch-perfect satire. In his opening showdown Jesse spars with his rival Hickock (Richmond Hoxie), an old-fashioned gunslinger who says he only kills for cause, and that sadistic killing ruins the reputation of cowboys everywhere. As for fighting for justice or protecting the righteous, well, a man has got to draw the line somewhere. He will rape, torture and murder any man, woman or child, but only for pleasure. Jesse one of the cold-blooded cowboys in the barroom comedy “Sundance,” a work of cultural criticism wrapped neatly in a suspenseful shoot-’em-up western lives by a strict moral code.