One-Act Play Festival brings four new works to life

They'll tackle it all, from dementia and celebrity to pornography and epistemology.

And they'll do it all in one act.

Theatre Odyssey's fourth annual One-Act Play Festival brought in 100 submissions from across the country, and four works will be staged for the very first time at the Jane B. Cook Theatre from Oct. 6-9.

Ann Morrison, who will be directing "The Mockingbird's Nest," says that one-act plays occur in a perfect narrative sweet spot and are sometimes more fully rendered than a two-act play would be.

"One-act plays have been around for centuries," she says. "Ten-minute plays are more challenging. You have to get the beginning, middle and end all in 10 minutes. The challenge for writers of 10-minute plays is I find is they have a tendency to want to wrap everything up neatly. But some stories are just told best when they’re one act. Having an intermission means having to stretch the storyline to make the second act make sense."

Morrison, speaking in the days before Hurricane Ian, said that she hadn't had much of an opportunity to interact with playwright Craig Bailey. She was conducting rehearsals with her two-member cast via Zoom and hoping to keep electricity through the storm.

She didn't want to give away too much of the play's plot, but she said that it involves a mother with dementia and a daughter who is slowly realizing her mother's condition. And then the whole plot gets flipped on its back. Morrison said there are great laugh out loud moments in the script, and she says she's excited for the playwright to be able to see it on the stage.

"We've all worked with Betty Robinson before and she's a dear. She's just charming in this and she said she'd never got to play a role like this before," says Morrison of her lead actress. "She's having lots of fun. What more can you say when you can also have fun doing what you're doing? Nellie O'Brien who's playing the other character hasn't been on our stages at all. Really, she's kind of fairly new here. And so it's fun to get her back on stage because she at one point had been a professional actress and let her professional status go."

Morrison says that three of the four plays have a futurism theme to them, but there's one literal component tying everything together. Preston Boyd, an actor, playwright and director, will be playing interstitial music pieces to hold the audience's attention as the sets and casts change behind him.

Boyd will be the first face people see when they arrive at the festival, before all of the actors.

"It's a double edged sword there," he says. "On the one possibility. I'm out there just playing a little tune and they go, 'Oh, it's okay to still talk now and read our program.' Then it doesn’t matter what I’m playing because nobody’s listening anyway. Or it could be one of those things where you start playing and they say, 'Ooh, I want to hear that.' I don't know what to look for or what to expect."

Boyd says he met his wife, Priscilla, while working on a production in Minnesota decades ago, and he's spent a life in the arts and in theater education. He spoke to each of the directors for the festival for input about what kind of music they'd like, and he'll be performing on both 12-string guitar and mandolin.

"I asked the directors to give me really a sense of mood, not so much what specific tunes they wanted, but the sense of the mood of the piece," he says. "I can kind of jam around a theme, if it's dark or if it's light, or if it's something that's kind of mysterious. I offered the directors the sound of banjo and nobody chose that."

Morrison, who first began acting in Sarasota in 1978, recently wrapped up her one-woman show "Merrily" at the Players Center for Performing Arts, and she says she hopes to take that show up to New York at some point. 

The charm of these one-act plays, she says, is that they're still in such a raw stage of their development.

"They have not been done anywhere before. It is the first time," she says. "So in a sense, it’s a delight for the playwright to see the words they put down on paper be put on stage.

"And hopefully, a lot of times, the performance of it informs the writers. 'Oh gee, that didn't play well, I can fix that.' Or, 'Oh, I like their interpretation of what I wrote better, and I can actually make that better next time.' You know, things like that, which are delicious."