Short Play Festival opens at the Shore in 'Rita From Across the Street'

For the New Jersey residents I once knew well, "the Shore" always had the saltwater aura of real life. But I was just  a summer visitor to my cousins and their parents, so my view was distorted by the larger-than-life reality of summering somewhere along the Garden State's Atlantic coast. 

I learned less about their Bergen County lives that shaped their home and school existence for most of the year. The Shore was the respite from all that, and it presented the illusion of meaning more, thanks to the leisure industry and the upscale amenities available to some. For young people, it could be hanging-out paradise.

In "Rita From Across the Street," the promise of something more for year-round as well as seasonal residents holds out the fragility and transitory quality of human connections. The economy is based on pleasure, cheap in some senses, overpriced in others. Shore life is embedded in Lou Harry, the creator and director of this play, set in Wildwood, his hometown. 

"Rita From Across the Street" opened the third annual Short Play Festival of American Lives Theatre  Thursday night. The five programs that make up the festival will run through Sunday at the District Theatre. This production has the feeling of being tried and tested, thoroughly workshopped, but also as fresh as theater can be. 

Mother and daughter pass their porch time separately.

The simply designed playing areas are adjacent front porches, one of them at the home of Mark, who rents out the place next door to a family headed for the summer by Donna. She fights off ennui generated by the absence of her husband, working from home elsewhere, and her uneasy relationship with their teenage daughter, Connie. She enjoys picking at the scabs of Mark's old wounds — a wife and a store proprietorship both gone forever — and his rooted conscientiousness in caring for his deeply troubled brother, Joey.

Donna, given a discontented, prickly affability in Sara Castillo Dandurand's performance, hints tenaciously that Mark should date the single woman of the name and location that provide the play's title. 

The routine of being from elsewhere and feeling unsettled can yield its own kind of pedantry. Inlanders who spend any time at the shore know immediately the smell of the saltwater air. How can that not be intoxicating? Yet Donna hates smells, she says, and is pedantic about correctness in language and attitudes: she's a "seasonal resident," not a tourist. This isn't fueled by anything more profound than her continual swigging of bottled beer and browsing her iPhone. 

Pushing back against Donna's conversational thrusts, Mark trots out his amused perspective initially. What strikes him most crucially about his life takes a while to emerge. There's a late scene between Donna and Mark that elaborates on the fantasies that shore life generates and makes their unattainability profound and moving. Clay Mabbitt as Mark reached some sort of transcendent level here, with Donna taking it in raptly but anxiously.

Mark's understanding of things is up for grabs.

There is a parade of short scenes along the way, Chekhovian snapshots of porch interactions among the three main characters. As the action deepens, the scenes broaden. The play is cannily paced so as to make the revelations carry the impact of both anticipation and exposure. This applies also to what we learn about the deeply disaffected daughter, Connie (Brittany Magee) who slouches and grumbles at adults dismissively as she indulges in her book-reading pastime. Her relationship with another young Wildwood resident, Rose (Maresa Kelly), explains a lot about her feistiness.

The structure of the play is stimulating, given the variety of the scenes and the surprises they toss up, never forced and somehow inevitable. Joey (Adam Thatcher), who repeats obsessively "you don't understand" to his brother in the one scene where he appears, accidentally illuminates the frequent failure of life to come up with good answers. 

More than a half-century ago, I struggled for self-understanding while living about 30 miles north of Wildwood in Margate City, just south of the tawdry tourist mecca of Atlantic City, where I taught at a private school. Across the street from the motel I had a room in was a relic of the kind one finds here and there along the paths of tourism, like the concrete ship Mark mentions in his dreamy dialogue with his lonely neighbor.  

My abandoned destination was a small hotel in the form of an elephant that everyone called Lucy. When I walked toward the beach I would pass this decrepit, odd inn.  Even in the off-season, I was aware of the summer boom to come, which once had favored Lucy among other attractions now succeeded by others.

I had to move out on Memorial Day weekend, even though that was just a couple of weeks before the end of the school year, so the motel owners could make big money. They were very nice about it. I understood. In the bleak months before that, on wintry walks along the shore,  I enjoyed recalling to  myself the line  "On Margate sands, I can connect nothing with nothing," 

That's from an immortal poem of the 20th century, "The Waste Land," by T.S. Eliot, and the reference is to a different Margate.  To recall it repeatedly in New Jersey was self-involved English-major stuff, I guess. But connections are hard to come by for the characters in "Rita From Across the Street" as well.  And Eliot's famous line mates well with Joey's toneless complaint.

This play brings us into the humor of snapped or avoided connections and delivers us at the disturbing far side of that struggle. The cast scrupulously details the strife and shows the possibility that real connections might be made with some prospect of satisfaction. You can't get that at a boardwalk souvenir store.