Just as the season begins to flirt with cold in earnest and the day starts to get dark long before dinner time, it's time for the Bloomington Playwrights Projects annual late night Sex Death series. This year the late night series offers ten mini plays, short works with two or three characters. Each piece is by a different playwright, but Jim Hettmer and Holly Holbrook split the directing and eleven actors share the various roles.
The plays are a varied and extremely enjoyable lot. In Mark Kingsbury's Street Corner, Erin Coon seems to be offering a simple solicitation but as Ian McCabe finds out, it has quite moving deep personal and even cosmic dimensions. "Different Creatures" by Don Frey has Max Newman and Christina Rahn exploring just how solidly personality is rooted in physicality. Joni McGary's "100% Distracted" offered a very funny dry primer in marriage percentages from husband Ian McCabe and a considerably damper assessment from plumber Reggie Provine and wife Emily Rose Giddings. In "Thursday Routine" by Rebecca Martin, Donna Cohen and Bill Goveia play an older couple who're still-at least verbally-hilariously going through the motions. G. H. Ellis's "Purposeful Life" is a dark take on the possibilities of the internet as worked out by Erin Coon and Reggie Provine. Who knows, maybe there really is a site called "suicidepartners.com", and a set of predators to go with it. In Bethany Barber's "Le Petit Morte" Lora Conrad and Max Newman explore the possible basis in reality of an old euphemism.. "Thanksgiving" by Neal Utterback was the dark entry of the evening with Reggie Provine as the centerpiece for Ian McCabe's annual harvest celebration.
These are just seven of the ten offerings. I have to apologize to authors Janis Butler Holm, Nick Moore and Paul Kubin, because a scheduling conflict got me to the theatre too late for their pieces. What I got to see was a very nice hour plus of entertaining theatre and people who get there on time should have an even better evening.