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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Year after year, Peter Hardy’s Essential Theatre Festival keeps plugging along. Hardy’s mission is to produce three new-to-Atlanta plays, including a world premiere selected from a competition open only to Georgia writers.
The 2007 winner is Jean Sterrett’s “Fix Me So I Can Stand,” featuring Spencer Stephens as an African-American man who is wrongly blamed for a double murder during the 1970s. Happily, one of last year’s honorees, Larry Larson and Eddie Levi Lee’s “Charm School,” recently got a well-received production at Horizon Theatre.
The festival itself is a sweet idea, more admirable in design, generally, than execution. So when the director’s cell phone rings during his curtain speech, you can’t help but twitter when he says: “Essential Theatre. No, we didn’t win the regional Tony Award. That was the Alliance.”
Good one.
Cheap shots aside, Hardy sometimes picks screamers that no one else in town will touch. “Betty’s Summer Vacation” by Christopher Durang. David and Amy Sedaris’ “The Book of Liz.” Karen Wurl’s backstage farce “Miss Macbeth.”
Too bad, then, that this year’s funny play — a “Christmas Carol” send-up by Durang called “Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge”— is possessed of so little brilliance. Hardy’s flimsy, stand-and-mug staging makes the Dickens parody feel like community theater, although this approach may be intentional, given that the source material is often treated as such.
Durang’s riff is that Mrs. Cratchit is more a Gladys Kravitz-meets-Leona Helmsley than a dutifully invisible 19th century hausfrau. Johanna Linden nails the vitriolic boil of this overburdened mother, and Jeffrey C. Zwartjes’ Mr. Cratchit is a wonderfully chirpy foil.
Alex Van’s lispy Scrooge debunks preconceptions of the character’s irascibility, but his performance is a dud. What redeems here are the outlandish transformations of Topher Payne and Bobby Labartino, particularly the latter’s riotous take on Mr. Fezziwig, as an over-the-top, falling-down-drunk clown in a carrot-top wig.
For another festival entry called “Night Travels,” Hardy has conceived an evening of one-act meditations on love and loss, dreams and journeys. The four pieces are wildly uneven, the choreography hokey, but the experience is likely to stick with you like an unsolved mystery or a partly remembered dream.
Karen Wurl’s “Movies,” a nervous confessional by a country woman who is seduced by a video-store cashier, comes alive through the terrific acting of Laurie Beasley, who pops up again in Charlotte Fleck’s haunting final story, “Night Travels.”
Fleck’s poetry is rough around the edges. But the playwright has a gift for capturing the blurry space between consciousness and sleep. By train, plane and boat, three women move across time and space. But their souls seem to pull them in other directions, as if they are following their own maps, charting their own internal navigations. With memories of their mothers as beacons, the characters glide over disturbances and bumps toward a new morning.
This is a project that deserves further development.
Through Sunday. $10-$40. 7 Stages, 1005 Euclid Ave., Little Five Points. 404-523-7647; essentialtheatre.com
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