You are in a mansion. Someone hands you a martini. An art director from Philadelphia Theatre Co. talks about the characters in Ruth McKee’s “500 Words” while an agent from Helen Merrill eyes the lead from Josh Tobiessen’s “Burnt Out.” There might be a literary manager talking with Tim Lord about his play “11 Hills of San Francisco” or a rep from Williamstown talking with Ken Weitzman about his commissison for the Washington, D.C. Arena Stage. “Is this New York? Hollywood? A dream?” you ask. Actually, if you are a theater student whose talent and perseverance got you into the UCSD graduate program, then this is the closing reception at the Baldwin Mansion for none other than UCSD’s Baldwin New Play Festival. That’s how good UCSD graduate theater is.
Though this writer has never actually scored an invitation, one can imagine the goings-on at the celebration for the festival that attracts big names in theater from across the nation to see the full-length and one-act plays written, directed, acted and designed by the Master of Fine Arts theater students. From plays about interns writing essays about “What it Means to Be American” to a hallucinatory Cripple Children Dream Ballet, the festival is chock-full of theater that will split your sides with laughter at one moment and rip out your heart the next at the various performances happening between April 11 and April 23.
If you’re wary of old dusty plays that have to transcend modern times, don’t be! Therein lies one of the many appeals of this festival: All the plays are new. The playwrights — all young, promising, talented and probably tormented artists — offer you plays that are fresh and salient, about issues you think about, but “News at 5” ignores. About jokes itching to be made, but “Friends” skips for its affiliates. About people who are like you, but Hollywood steamrolls with lip-gloss and three-point lighting. You will not see the WB’s version of life, but a sweating, breathing, beautiful existence interpolated through the poetics of the MFA playwrights.
For example, third-year MFA Barry Levey’s play, “Citizens of Rome,” directed by Gerardo Jose Ruiz, functions on one level as a play about a family — a fucked-up but eerily familiar one — with two Jewish-American parents who scream at the sight of a Palestinian (Mother: “… it’s nice you don’t wear one of those … burkas.” Father: “Miriam! She means … you have a pretty face.”) and two sons just aching to impress/shock their parents with their more cultured lifestyles. (One continuously adopts crippled children from impoverished third-world countries, the other convinces a gay tribal Papua New Guinean, who recites “Sex and the City” episodes he’s seen on satellite, to invent a traditional Rain Dance for the ’rents.) As the two set out to escape their parents and Enron-esque financial collapse to save Iraq, the play becomes about anything from sibling rivalry to secret lesbian adoration to America’s role in globalization.
Levey, who said he started the play as a personal story about family and an experiment in structure, inevitably found it included themes of a political nature.
“On the first day, [the director] said, ‘everyone in this play has a crusade.’ The character Najuah articulates a lot of this, about how much we screw up trying to fix things … how always doing that is looking down on people and not really relating to them as equals,” Levey said.
While normally new plays are normally shown in intimate settings like the smaller Studio Forum — making it important to get your tickets in advance — “Citizens of Rome” has the rare privilege of playing in the large Weiss Forum, something Levey said is both “exciting and terrifying.”
Levey’s play is only one example of the complexity, humor, poetics and entertainment that BNPF plays have to offer; space forbids discussion of any more examples. Here is the bottom line: the Baldwin New Play Festival is the most cutting-edge event to happen at UCSD, period. The choice between seeing another billion-dollar comic book movie, playing Halo or fronting 10 bucks to see a play at the Festival is clear. Check out the full list of plays and schedules at http://theatre.ucsd.edu.
