Have a short attention span? An evening of 10-minute plays might be for you.
The City Theater Company offers its popular Community Series February 25-March 5. This year’s show, “B-Sides, Rarities and Unreleased Tracks: An Evening of Short Plays by Alex Dremann,” sets up audiences for lots of humor, but in spurts. No play exceeds the 10-minute mark.
Try to develop a character, let alone a plot, in 10 minutes. Not easy. But this year’s featured playwright, Alex Dremann, the producing artistic director of Secret Room Theater in Philadelphia, gets the genre. The popular CTC writer was responsible for favorite 10-minute plays such as “Fits,” “Georgia Robbed a Bank” and “Dead Wong.”
In his playwright’s notes, Dremann says that the plays chosen for the production are a cross-section of more than 100 short-short plays he’s written over the last 15 years. “I tried to work it so it was a good sampling of lengths (but all less than 10 minutes) styles and tones-mixing, some brand new ones in with some previously produced ones.”
A few of the older works presented were created as exercises in a writing group called reWrights in Los Angeles. Others were written for his former sketch comedy group, SKITSoid, in Philadelphia.
Acting a short story has its challenges, too. These casts can handle them. Gracing the OperaDelaware Studios in Wilmington will be James Kassees, Mary Catherine Kelley, Timothy Donovan, Kathy Buterbaugh, Pat Sutton, Moriah Gornstein, Bill Swezey, Danielle Finlay, Tim Sheridan, Tina Hession, Todd Holtsberry, Kat Simon, Rebecca Balaguer, Greg O’Neill and Danton Spina.
Contact info: The Black Box @ OperaDelaware Studios, 4 S. Poplar St., Wilmington. Tickets are $20; VIP tickets are $30.
Available at http://www.city-theater.org/, or at the box office.
