CATF entertaining, "Conversations" taking on life of its own

So back some months ago, I decided and committed to going up to Shepherdstown, WV for a second year to take in some of the new plays at CATF. For those who don't know, Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF) is in its 20th year, working on the campus of Shepherd University and using its facilities to present, nowadays, five new works each summer with an Equity cast and providing lots of opportunities for Shepherd and other young theater students to work shows.

A good friend of ours is the business manager there, and she convinced me last year to make the trip, and I found it quite worth it. All three shows I saw, I felt, were worthy and entertaining within my vision of what constitutes entertaining theater.

This year, I was set to see three more shows, but ended up dropping one of them in order to accommodate a reviewer who wanted to get into a sold-out performance. For me, it worked out well, for my overall favorite this year, "Breadcrumbs," is the show I picked up to replace the one I was going to miss. Yay! It was only a little over an hour long, but very touching, very well performed, a very nice lighting design by Colin Bills (one of Andy's friends in the DC theater lighting group) and just no false notes I could discern. The story deals with a young woman seeking some kind of purpose and an older woman writer starting to disappear into Alzheimers. Liked it a whole lot!

I wish I could be as enthusiastic about the rest of my stay. I liked the second show, "Inana," quite well, but it wasn't earth-shattering, though it did a fine job of tapping into a culture less known to the average American. It deals with a newly-married Iraqi couple -- an arranged marriage -- and we slowly learn why they have ended their marriage day, which started back at home, in a hotel in London. It's a good mystery, and was generally well-acted, and there's certainly a tension. But one of the transitions, to me, seemed a little abrupt -- my feeling was the playwright could have given a few more lines to smooth the transition. Others felt it might have been weakness on the part of the actress. I didn't see that, but I certainly felt there was room for improvement somehow! And that in turn stole a little bit from the play's overall impact.

And then my last show. Wow. "The Eelwax Jesus 3D Pop Music Show." Allegedly a musical, though actually sort of a disguised rock/pop concert with a fair amount of pretty uninteresting music and a fair number of disjointed images being thrown out on either side of where they placed the band. I can only say I've never seen a more random conglomeration of stuff being thrown on a stage. They could have saved a lot of room in the program by calling it "Random," in fact. I made it to the end, but it was a close thing on bailing at intermission. It would surprise me very much if this show made anything other than noise anywhere else in the future.

Now back in the Triad, and even while I was gone, the details and planning for "Conversations in a Cafe" began to show that time is growing shorter and suddenly the work is going to have to get serious. Finding prop and set dressing items; contracting for the music license rights; buying additional lighting instruments; planning for auditions; getting the script ready to copy for read-through; contacting production folks; and a lot of other correspondence. There's a lot to putting on a play! (In case you didn't already know that.)