Appalachain Festival of Plays and Playwrights, Continued

Here I am again in the Barter Cafe in between readings for day number two of the AFPP. Yesterdays second reading of The Dillsboro Pickle Queen of 1955 was one that I had to more or less convince myself to sit through for the sake of watching a reading. The format was set up so that the entire play "read" like a book. Scenes were separated by "chapters" and the lead male acted as a narrator and would go off on wild, imaginative tangents as writers often do to embellish their hum drum lives. Or at least this writer had a hum drum life as he was forced to stay and take care of his mother because of a promise that he had made with his now passed father ten years before. So he and his mother, forced out of Connecticuit by a hurricaine, moved back to his mothers native town of Dillsboro, North Carolina where she reopened the Smokey Dokey Lodge which she inherited from her father. Anyway, to make a long story short, The writer, Paul was his name, falls in love with a local hard ass beauty queen who has ambitions to be an actress. Secrets are revealed when a talent agent passing through screws over the beauty queen and Paul ends up having a revalation and comes to peaceful terms with his father and the fact that he's been missing all of his life. The script was lacking in what I feel was basic character development. The audience has no reason to feel anything for any of the actors and nothing to sympathize since the action of the play was small and virtually no tension mounted. But overall I liked the way the actin of the play went. The innovative layout made for a new style that I feel we'll see more of in future theatre and the absence of blackouts made for little to no lagtime and a fluid movement from place to place.

SO, with that being said I just got out of the first reading for today and it was GREAT! The play was Catherine Bush's Comin' Up A Storm, the third in the trilogy she has made beginning with The Other Side of the Mountain and the middle being Quiltmakers, which is being used as a mini production for the AFPP. I had the privilledge of seeing The Other Side of the Mountain last year as part of Barter's normal rep season, so seein today's Comin' Up A Storm was a treat. It was, by far, the best of the AFPP reading's I've seen. Fully developed, reasoned, thought out and you can easily love and identify with the characters! Bravo to Catherine Bush and her wonderful works! I hope to see much more of them and possibly either direct or be in one of her productions in the future...Maybe that will be my "calling" at UMD: to introduce Appalachain works to a big city crowd. Who knows? But I do know that all three of Ms. Bush's trilogy plays are terrific and I feel that any of them would read well to an audience anywhere.

So with that being said I'm off into the theatre again where I'll view Black Pearl Sings byFrank T. Higgins. I don't know anything about it, but that makes it fun, right? So I'll post either later today or tomorrow about it! I'm off...