The Final Two Openings of the Baltimore Playwrights Festival Make for a Break-Even Weekend
Confidence. This is what sets playwright Rich Espey's work apart from the more middling fare offered up in past and present Baltimore Playwrights Festivals. Too often festival submissions lack direction, as if the writers were unsure where to take the work--comedy? drama? mystery? What they become are stagnant muddles. Oftentimes, too, the striving playwrights doubt their ability to get their dramatic messages across without pounding you over the head (or heart) with them, leading to didacticism and/or sentimentality.
Espey's festival entry, Fifty-Fifty, is an unabashed comedy that jumps out of the gate with crisp authority and is propelled though its dramatic turns by clever wordplay and zingy one-liners. Espey believes in his pen, and what it has turned out is a sparkling traipse through the prickly politics of bisexuality.
Though set in a hoary girls boarding school, doe-eyed Lolitas in pleated skirts are not the provocateurs here. Rather, the action revolves around the schools' new, young headmaster, Scott (Jonas Grey), and his wife, Rebecca (April Crowell). Though the school pretentiously bills itself as "the only continuously operating girls' board school southwest of the Connecticut river," it's kind of a dumpy affair, and Scott tells his wife to view the appointment as a mere stepping-up the private-school food chain. Knocking him out of step, however, is the sudden appearance of old flame Nick (Maynard Edwards), now the lover of openly--nah, flamboyantly--gay teacher David (Oscar Ceville). Scott's surprise reunion with his heretofore hidden homosexual past does not go well. Suddenly, all the living-room small talk is peppered with gay references--at least to his ears. "Are you a gay?" his wife asks casually, causing Scott to emit an eye-bulging "What!?" "I said, are you OK?" his wife responds (this time). Espey hilariously fashions a score of such paranoid misreads.
David, meanwhile, espouses a sexual theory that posits everyone is part gay and part straight, and it's just a matter of figuring out what percentage of each you are. He's a member of STRIP (Sexual Tension Reduction for International Peace), which allows that all the world's problems can be traced to the oppression of latent urges. Scott, he figures, is the most troubled sort of all--a "50-50," half gay and half straight. While Scott (and his frustrated Mrs.) come to terms with his divided sexuality, the pair lock horns with the school's blustery, forceful board chair Jenna Guthrie-Woodcock (Bethany Brown). And when not spouting Espey's tangy lines, the players frequently quote Shakespeare (they are academics, after all). Far from coming across as awkward and artificial, these bits of the Bard add poignancy.
The actors seem to have confidence in Espey's material as well, and respond with slick performances. You could say there are two ringers in the cast, as Crowell (a dynamo as the jilted wife who tries to seduce the 8 percent of Nick that's straight) and Brown (a deliciously manic matron) are members of the Actors Equity Association. (It's rare to find union actors participating in festival works.) And director Neal Freeman keeps the action humming smoothly, which helps put Fifty-Fifty in the best screwball comedy tradition.
