Theatre Company of Lafayette is the chihuahua of the local theater community. The little dog thinks it’s a Doberman.
It continues to launch audacious programming initiatives that bigger programs with far more resources would never dare take on.
For the second time in as many years, the company has commissioned the writing and staging of a series of short plays inspired by a common theme. Last year it was Frankenstein; this year it’s the Russian satellite Sputnik, the first man- made object to orbit the Earth.
These collaborative outreach efforts benefit audience, community and company. More than 40 writers, actors, directors and technicians have contributed to “The Deep Beep-Beep: Eight Short Plays about Sputnik.” It’s a remarkable undertaking with a good spirit that’s obvious from the bilingual curtain speech – in English and Russian.
Regrettably, all this does not also inherently make “Sputnik” a great artistic accomplishment. The writing is largely unremarkable and often feels redundant or unfinished. The quality of the acting varies greatly, as must be expected in a grassroots, community theater effort like this.
An established guest artist like Deborah Persoff stands out like a star in the sky; a few company members show surprising chops; and others … well, others haven’t quite learned their lines. That’s OK, though; that’s all part of what gives a neighborhood initiative like this its charm.
What “Sputnik” really needed to make a lasting artistic impact was the strong and uncompromising hand of a dramaturge with an overall objective in mind, working meticulously with each playwright to improve the scripts and make them more complementary to each other.
Though the eight plays vary wildly in premise, there is a redundancy of ideas that grows dulling. Yes, America should have been first; the little orb really didn’t do much beyond beep and track temperatures – but its very existence fueled a paranoid and perturbed America into a space race that changed the course of human events (after all, if Russia could launch a satellite, perhaps it could also launch nuclear weapons).
If you miss any of those themes in one, you’ll get them in another. Not one, but two “Twilight Zone”-like plays have characters from 2007 comparing how life has – and hasn’t – changed with characters from the Sputnik era. Several translate the word “Sputnik” into English for you (“fellow traveler”).
The art of writing a 10-minute play is not the same as it is for a full-length. For a 10-minute play to feel finished and satisfying, it can’t tell an epic story. It must have one manageable and well-executed concept. The most successful script in this regard is Denverite Edith Weiss’ pop-culture allegory, “Dancing With the Jihad.”
It imagines a cheerful woman (Persoff) who has been hired to teach an immigrant woman the tango, the most physical and passionate of dances. She’s surprised to discover her student (Alexandria St. Aubin) to be dressed in a full burka and physically immovable. When the American can’t get the Middle Eastern to embrace her ways, she literally, if inadvertently, destroys her. Not sure what that has to do with Sputnik, but it’s good writing.
The lineup includes a big New York name in Rob Gerlach, who wrote the Agathie Christie spoof “Something’s Afoot.” Turns out he has family in Lafayette, so he graciously contributed “Sput- Night.” The lightweight comic opening bit shows a daffy Mamie Eisenhower taking calls in the presidential bedroom after the launch as Ike snoozes away.
Three actors worth singling out: Ashley VanScoyoc as a bizarre, Holocaust-surviving German scientist charged 12 years after his escape with building the American answer to Sputnik (“Chosen”); Alexandria St. Aubin as a contemporary writer who comes face to face with short-story author Margaret Gibson – only it’s 1957 for Gibson (“Fellow Traveler”); and a brilliantly comic Mary Secor as the statistician for a most unusual support group: Sputnik babies who are now about to turn 50 (“D’edushka Korolev”).
There’s also a parody of “Star Trek” and an out-of-place epic about the plight of women astronauts, all of which makes for an effort that tries to reach into the far corners of the universe – but rarely gets off the launching pad.
“The Deep Beep-Beep: Eight Short Plays About Sputnik”
300 E. Simpson St., Lafayette. Through Oct. 27. 2 hours, 40 minutes. 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 2 p.m. Oct. 21. $12-$15. 720-209-2154 or .
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
