Summer Shorts: Series B
Opening Night: July 25, 2015
Closing: August 29, 2015
Theater: 59E59 Theaters
Summer Shorts returns for another summer of new American one-acts featuring original plays by the country’s top playwrights. Representing some of today’s best writing, directing and acting talents, Summer Shorts celebrates theater, summer and the short form. The festival’s two separate series offer a diverse range of voices, styles and subject matter. Summer Shorts 2015 offers six world premiere one-act plays, presented as two separate evenings of three each. The two series will run in rotating repertory.
BUY TICKETSREAD THE REVIEWS:
August 2, 2015
Stella (Colby Minifie), a young Southerner adrift in upstate New York, adopts an unusual pen pal. She worries he won’t write back as he’ll be occupied with “ordering people around, or eating lobster on silver plates or getting a massage, that kind of thing.” But Kim Jong-il responds. He even sends an autographed photo.Stella Fawn Ragsdale’s whimsical solo one-act, “Love Letters to a Dictator,” concludes the second series of this year’s Summer Shorts festival at 59E59 Theaters. Ms. Ragsdale’s heroine, who shares her name and her background, is so unmoored in her life that she turns to a tyrant in the hope that she “might steal strength from you and learn a ferocity.” Logan Vaughn’s direction is overactive and the character’s faux-naïf posture and formal diction are sometimes exasperating. But the tonal mix of the letters — confiding, needling, probing, sympathizing — reveals a distinct and compelling voice (though probably not one that would have been appreciated by Mr. Kim, North Korea’s supreme leader until his death in 2011).
READ THE REVIEW