The 2021 10-Minute Play Festival debuts with rewards for adventurous short attention spans

The task of playwrights to get something dramatic started and finished in under ten minutes must be to have audiences quickly focused on characters and a situation with a minimum of exposition. Back stories must be cryptic. Very little context-setting dialogue can be afforded. What can be put across that won't seem like merely an idea for a play, rather than an actual play, complete in itself?

'Two Yards of Satan': Devil is in seamstress' details.

The form seems more limiting than the short story, because you need actors to mediate concisely between words on the page and stage presentation. Seven of this year's submissions to the 10-Minute Play Festival debuted on Indy Fringe's Basile stage Thursday night, and they met the shrunk genre's difficulties with a range of ambition and success. They have different directors and emerge from different creative niches.

The annual festival is coordinated by Megan Ann Jacobs, who wrote one of the seven plays: "Karma Cop," a wry comedy about law enforcement as a kind of social work, complete with supernatural stop-start powers. The festival is presented with support from the Indiana Playwrights Circle under the aegis of Indiana Writers Center. There are three more festival performances; the run ends Sunday afternoon.

On opening night, the performance level was generally high, though sometimes the direction seemed to take for granted that the audience would catch on about 15 seconds in. The concentration required by the time limit made a few performances feel rushed. Several shows were clearly pandemic-shadowed. The virtual world, in and out of COVID-19, has become part of today's subject matter. Technology we're still getting used to (just as we're getting used to the virus) blurs the line between realism and fantasy/sci-fi.

A common theme of how we get to know each other these days — though I will defer to younger generations in first-hand knowledge — comes up a few times. Characters learning about each other used to have their relationships charged and developed by guesswork, intuition, and secondary characters; now there are tempting shortcuts. 

Even real-life catalysts to human relationships can feel artificial: In "Scavengers," by Marcia Eppich-Harris, a man and a woman getting acquainted at a restaurant after having made initial contact online are thrown into pretend intimacy in response to a couple of pushy teens. The title hints at what the somewhat bullying youngsters are up to: they need to photograph two people in love as part of a church scavenger hunt. The wary couple moves closer, at first under duress, then relief. Accidents drive intimacy — 'twas ever so.

Artificially generated pushbacks against our conventional distance from strangers are central to the mystery of "Terms and Conditions," by Mary Karty. There a world slightly in advance of ours gets lonely people hooked up with life-like robots who are programmed to be exact matches to the human clients through a dating site called Sirilicious, OKCupid on AI steroids. Or is it the young man and others like him who are programmed to be rejected by war-weary robots who are really in charge? The answer is both subtler and crueler than Tinder's swipe left.

'Dog Park': Pet brings to two strangers together.

There are a couple of plays that could be taken as "single-issue," with a narrowness that suits the 10-minute format. One is funny, the other disturbing. They are "Two Yards of Satan" by Kelly Andronicos and "Echoes" by Garret Schneider. 

The former draws heavily on the conventions of sketch comedy, with a sole  stretched joke — a typo that has a woman making a First Communion dress ordering a six-foot-tall Satan instead of the two yards of satin she needs. Old Nick is a nicely bundled caricature in the performance of David Molloy. A cop called to check out the confrontation is given lines of a post-modernist sort near the end: the character muses aloud on a whim of the playwright's to throw in some impertinent topical commentary. Groan! 

"Echoes" deals with a mother and daughter searching for a family member who's an avid spelunker gone missing. The separated sounds signaled by the play's title are played for both repetition and variation remotely. The auditory phenomenon of cave echoes is put to simple but striking dramatic purposes here.

Close pet relationships throw two strangers together in "Dog Park," by Rosie Gingrich. But they know what they are getting into, thanks to social media. The heart-tug of pet ownership during a period of social isolation was sweetly laid out in Maggie Sebald's and Kaitlynn Nailon's performances. 

The modern growth of personnel departments into virtual encyclopedias of personal information makes "Nice Knowing You" by Lou Harry a tidy exercise in peeling the human-resources onion back layer by layer. The piece itself is nicely layered, as the two characters are an HR professional and the man she replaced, feeling their way on an awkward retrospective date. They are trying to get past resentment on the one hand, guilt on the other.

Their professionally honed curiosity has given them loads of information about each other. The dialogue takes on the intricacy of a chess match, ending in stalemate. The piece conveys quite a bit about Carla and Don, as played shrewdly by Kelsey Leigh Miller and Bryan Ball Carvajal. The universal lack of privacy is exposed with devastating irony. TMI might someday be inscribed on all our tombstones.

[Photos by Rob Slaven]