Bloomington Playwrights Project offers sneak peek of plays

Like an Etch A Sketch, the BloomingPlays Development Series grants audiences the flexibility to smooth and shape the outlines of a playwright’s productions.

Between the 80 plays submitted from Hoosiers across the state, nine plays were selected to be featured in the workshop by the Indianapolis Theatre Association and the Bloomington Playwrights Project.

“The idea is to provide great talent of Bloomington and the state with a venue,” said managing director and included playwright Gabe Gloden.

Ranging from five minutes to a full-length production, staged readings from each of the plays will be performed 11 a.m. to 3:15 p.m. Saturday and 12 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Sunday at the Bloomington Playwrights Project. 

After each show, the audience is welcome to express commentary and criticism.
“I want to hear what popped for the audience and what was negative to establish the strength of the play,” Gloden said. “It is a ‘spoonful of sugar’ theory applied to a feedback structure.”

Structure and instant review of each staged reading will send all nine winning plays on their path to the BloomingPlays Festival in May 2010.

Although most of the included playwrights have experience, two of the playwrights submitted their first play.

The series will begin with a play about a spunky elderly woman who purposefully fails the DMV’s driving test every month because she admires her driving instructor. During one exam, the elderly lady’s crush is substituted by a different man who is forced to deal with her interesting driving skills, which at one point take them through a car wash.

“It is a story where characters are physically trapped like a good Twilight Zone episode,” playwright Matt Anderson said. “The coolest part is how they handle the situation at hand.”

The envisioned car wash bubbles will be cleaned off the stage to perform a reading of a dirtier atmosphere of a New York City subway.

Two construction workers riding the F Train support and beef each other up with tough love.

Playwright Chris White said she was inspired by watching a young man and woman on the subway.

“Two or three times over the course of watching, one of them would reach up and smack the other in the face,”  White said. “It was that classic sense of, ‘hey whatchu doin?’ combined with loyalty and camaraderie.”

After writing historic romance novels, Brenda Hiatt Barber took a swing at writing a play and called it “Folds of Favor” from its original title “The Good Daughter.”

A seemingly delirious and aging mother throws her three daughters’ heads for a whirl as she tricks them into a situation giving her the last laugh.

Sneak peeks of plays before their actual polished production are an opportunity to shout thoughts normally concealed during an afternoon of theater.

“A playwright tends to have mixed feelings about input, but the trick is always balancing the intuition of a piece’s vision with outside perspective,” White said.