Theater Marathon's 10-minute works are packed with pleasures

May 25, 2006|Sandy MacDonald, Globe Correspondent

For 10 magical hours every spring, Boston's theater community pulls together like one giant ensemble in the Boston Theater Marathon to bolster the Theatre Community Benevolent Fund. The event benefits everyone involved: the theater professionals in need whom the fund helps (last year's event raised $10,324.10), playwrights who can try out new work on a game audience, and spectators, who for $30 get a glimpse of all sorts of up-and-coming talent, both on the page and onstage.

Sunday's lineup at the Boston Center for the Arts' Calderwood Pavilion -- 50 10-minute scripts, culled from a pool of 330 -- was packed with pleasures. This short form is demanding: How do you cram exposition, character development, and dramatic arc into the space of a couple of TV commercial breaks? Most of the playwrights managed, some with astonishing panache.

In this context, comedy tends to be easy, tragedy hard. Pathos, after all, must be earned, and when the clock is ticking, the effort can seem forced. K. Alexa Mavromatis's ``Bone China," for example, sponsored by the Actors' Shakespeare Project, features two adult sisters poring over the attic detritus of their dead mother, a daunting premise. But wait, one of the women is also the mother of a 2-year-old, and won't be for long because she has cancer. Despite the best efforts of Devon Jencks (as the afflicted sibling) and Caryn Andrea Lindsey, that's way too much front-loading.

Jami Brandli's ``Normal," produced by Alarm Clock Theatre Company, strikes just the right balance. Bobby Jr. -- Joey Del Ponte, the event's only child performer, and a natural -- is up a tree, refusing to come down unless his father (Kevin LaVelle) lets him wear his favored costume: an assortment of colorful scarves. What they stand for is revealed gradually, to deeply touching effect.

Several plays benefit from rabbit-out-of-the-hat denouements, but none more than Vanessa David's ``Early Dismissal" (Nora Theatre Company), in which two women (Stephanie Clayman and Faith Justice) commiserate about the insufficiencies of daycare. ``MOMologues" redux, you think, but no, and you're forced to recalibrate all your assumptions.