Yule Laugh, Yule Cry
Sharp actors bring laughs and drama to eight short holiday-themed plays in A Very Nouveau Holiday at the Margo Jones Theatre.
Dallas — Take the Fair Park exit and drive past the huge parking lots at the 5,000-seat Music Hall to the Margo Jones Theatre, a small black box theater housed in the art deco-style Magnolia Lounge Building. This elegant structure is the home of Nouveau 47 Theatre, currently showing its fifth annual production of short, holiday-themed plays by local playwrights, called A Very Nouveau Holiday. The fifth annual showcase is the work of Executive Producer Erin Singleton and Associate Producer Cain Rodriguez.
Small, swift, well-acted productions are special gifts any time of year, and these minimally produced plays are a happy anecdote to the many big holiday shows, featuring buckets of artificial snow and actors sweating in heavy winter costumes.
Each play here is 10 to 15-minutes long, and the actors bring not only their honed skills but also their props—a couch, a coffee bar, a laptop—to the stage. Some plays work better than others, but the subthemes of holiday joy and sadness are different and all the actors are solid. What’s fun to watch is the necessarily rapid rise to conflict and equally speedy resolution. Ribs show.
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| Emily Faith, Robert Long and Monalisa Amidar in LANGDON, THE SEASONAL BARISTA |
My favorite play is Brad McEntire’s Langdon the Seasonal Barista, a surprising and hilarious three-scener about a non-hibernating bear hooked on coffee trying to keep his gig at Starbucks without mauling customers with love hugs and withstanding the ruthlessly upbeat HR woman who comes to the shop for an employee review. Tight, revealing and truly comic!
Directors working in the production include Andra Hunter, Rebecca McDonald, Brad McEntire and David Meglino.
Dallas is lucky to have a deep acting pool, evident in virtually all the shows I see in town. Actors filling multiple roles here are: Monalisa Amidar, J. R. Bradford, Cameron Casey, Emily Faith, Robert Long, Chris Messersmith, Charles Ratcliff II, and Jerome Stein.
Everybody’s good in their shifts of character, but I was totally knocked out by Robert Long, recently seen in Waiting for Lefty at Upstart Productions. He plays a caffeine-deprived bear, a depressive Santa and a goody-good teenager with riveting confidence, but somehow always keeping something of himself in his striking angular face and tense, wiry body. More, please.
Singleton and company invite you to BYOB and a friend, get obnoxiously loud with your laughter, and take all the photos you want.
Original post... HERE
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