On March 10, Durango PlayFest unveiled the four plays that will be presented at its eighth annual festival in June. Of the 200 pieces submitted for our consideration, there were many exceptional plays. However, the goal is not to just pick great plays but to select plays that work as a “season,” plays with different themes, genres and character arcs. This year’s festival has a bit of everything – comedy, drama, absurdism, a bit of horror.
“A Deal Picked Just for You” is an absurdist comedy where shut-ins Maggie and Brenda have sworn off the chaos of the outside world and focus their obsessions on Amazon packages, food delivery and denial – that is, until a string of uninvited guests upends their fragile bubble.
Playwright John Farmanesh-Bocca describes his play as a darkly comic reflection on modern life: “It’s absurd, it’s funny – but it’s also a little unsettling. Even when we try to isolate ourselves, the world finds a way in.”
Playwright Lyle Kessler says his play, “The German,” is based on a true story, but with a fictional ending.
Decades after an altercation on a train, a Jewish playwright from New York City decides to travel to Germany and the home of the German who intends to kill him – a home haunted by ghosts of the Jewish family who once lived there. Kessler says the play is unexpectedly funny, at times emotionally devastating, but ultimately liberating.
PlayFest Artistic Director Felicia Lansbury adds that “The German” is not a play about World War II, but rather the emotional and physical repercussions felt many years after. “The story asks whether healing is possible after the wounds of history,” she says.
“The Henry Clyde Canning Murder House,” by playwright Christian Missonak, takes a modern and completely different look at the emotional devastation a family experiences after tragedy.
Years after their father is convicted of the murder of 16 women, siblings Elise and Harry are forced to confront their own buried secrets when Harry comes home with plans to exploit their infamous past by converting the family homestead into a murder house tourist attraction.
Missonak says his play is about a family forced to confront the story everyone else thinks they already know, and how two siblings choose drastically different ways of moving on.
One of PlayFest’s play reviewers noted the play aligns with our culture’s current obsession with true crime documentaries and television series. It’s the stuff that we can’t look away from.
Playwright Zoe Stanton-Savitz said the inspiration for her play, “Hazel and Bea in the In-Between,” came from a class she took her senior year in college about writing theater for queer audiences. She says the plays the class studied were primarily stories of young queer people. She began thinking about same-sex couples in decades past who had to keep relationships hidden or unspoken because of social stigma and legal risks.
Stanton-Savitz decided to write a play about two elderly women – Hazel, sharp-tongued and fiercely independent, and Bea, warm but forgetful – who meet as roommates in a nursing home. They clash over space, noise and personality. As they reminisce about the lives that they’ve lost, Hazel comes to believe Bea is the Beatrice she loved as a teenager.
You can read the playwrights’ bios at durangoplayfest.org/festival. Tickets go on sale April 10 at durangoconcerts.com.
Mandy Mikulencak is managing director of Durango PlayFest and an author of historical fiction. She’s worked in the nonprofit sector for 35 years.