AS lightweight as its title suggests, “Summer Shorts 2” seems tailor-made for heat-induced short attention spans. But while the brief one-acts that comprise “Series A” don’t add up to very much in terms of substance, they provide both moving and amusing diversions along the way.
The most moving piece, Neil Koenigsberg’s “On the Bench,” is also the most schematic. It depicts a conversation between a bookish young man (David Beck) and a middle-age woman (the terrific Mary Joy) on a park bench near the iconic Stonewall Inn. Both have an intense connection to the historic riot that occurred there; he is a self-described “WASP from “WASPville” with sexual identity issues, while she was much more personally involved.
In Leslie Lyles’ “The Waters of March,” the elegant Amy Irving plays a faded cabaret singer waxing nostalgic about her days in Rio while alternately singing snatches of the classic Jobim song of the same name. But as the singer goes on to describe her unceremonious firing from her annual gig at the Algonquin Hotel, the piece takes a darker turn. “It’s been like winding a giant ball of twine only to find that there’s nothing at the end of it,” she says about her life.
Eduardo Machado’s “Crossing the Border” depicts a conversation between a Mexican father (Mando Alvarado) and his teenage son (Gio Perez) as they engage in batting practice. It turns out that the father is desperately trying to make the boy skilled in America’s national pastime so that he can escape his poor upbringing like so many Latinos have already done. “We were born in the wrong country in the wrong time,” he says.
Roger Hedden’s “Deep in the Hole” ends the evening on an amusingly raucous note. It concerns the interactions among two guys (J.J. Kandel, David Ross) and two gals (Emily Tremaine, Kendra Mylnechuk) which include hilariously profane debates about sex and vodka, a game of spin the bottle, and an incident involving what may or may not be anthrax.
SUMMER SHORTS 2: SERIES A