The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
3 new plays on display at Long Wharf
Fest tackles AA meeting, Ugandan family, police violence
Working playwrights know this to be true: They don’t know what they’ve wrought until they hear their plays performed in front of a live audience. To that end, Long Wharf Theatre presents its fourth annual “New Works Festival” Friday and Saturday, featuring a trio of staged readings on Stage II.
“You know, it’s such a vital part of the playwriting process,” said Torrey Townsend, whose “Night Workers,” directed by Knud Adams, closes the festival at 8 p.m. Saturday.
“Night Workers” is set, Townsend said, in an alcoholics clubhouse in a neighborhood in Brooklyn. “It’s a predominantly working-class neighborhood. The play takes place inside of that clubhouse over the course of a couple of months.”
Long Wharf’s literary manager Christine Scarfuto, who serves as curator of the festival, said the work “feels particularly relevant given the recent overdoses on the New Haven Green this summer.”
“The play is about people from all walks of life who come together each week for this AA meeting,” she said. “It’s raw, funny and there’s an incredible truth to it — it humanizes the process of recovery and is a great testament to the resilience of the human spirit.”
Angella Emurwon’s play “Strings,” directed by Leah C. Gardiner, jumpstarts the festival Friday at 7 p.m. Set in a village in Emurwon’s native Uganda, “Strings” is a family drama about the return of the family patriarch after 20 years.
“It’s a gorgeous family drama with incredibly rich language and storytelling,” Scarfuto said. “It’s a universal
story that asks how you reckon with the choices you’ve made in your life.
Kevin Artigue’s “Sheepdog,” also directed by Gardiner, takes place at 5:30 p.m. Saturday. Scarfuto said “Sheepdog” is a play about “uncovering truth, and it pulls you in every step of the way.
“The play speaks to issues of police violence in the black community, which is a huge and devastating issue in the country today,” said Scarfuto, who read about 150 scripts under consideration for this year’s festival. “The play feels very much in dialogue with the national conversation surrounding this issue.”
The festival, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Burry Fredrik Foundation, hustles Townsend and Artigue to New Haven for rehearsals two days before curtain time Friday (Emuron, unable to secure a visa, will not attend the festival). They’ll work together on the specifics of staging, rhythm and interpretation.
Paramount in the process, however, is the script, and the star of the event is the playwright. Artigue, who, like Emurwon and Townsend, has developed several plays in similar festivals and workshops, said that this festival affords him the ideal opportunity “to hear the play anew.”
“I haven’t heard it in a
while,” said Artigue, who earned his MFA from Iowa Playwrights Workshop. “It’ll have been roughly five, six months since I’ve heard it in front of an audience, so it’s going to be incredibly valuable to be in the space with the audience listening in.
“I’m hoping to learn some new things about the play,” he added. “I imagine, when I’m done with those two days, I’ll have a ton of rewrites in mind.”
Artigue’s primary concern during rewrites is to take a high-profile societal problem and “make it personal and specific.”
“For me, that’s often writing about my relationship to other human beings,” he said. “So, it’s taking a larger conflict, a societal conflict, a political conflict, and then you really ground it in a relationship. It’s through the characters — their needs and wants — that you can tease out an issue and hopefully get to the bottom of it, even if what you are uncovering is more questions.”
Townsend agreed that the festival grants an opportunity to develop his work and “to see how it can grow, and to learn what I’ve done wrong.”
“The process is ever ongoing in the theater with a play,” said Townsend, a graduate of Columbia University. “As the writer, you have to always lend yourself to the process. That means being open to learning new things, and doing rewrites, because it’s not ultimately about you alone as an individual Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Drive, New Haven. Friday-Saturday, Sept. 2122. 7 p.m. Friday, 5:30 and 8 p.m. Saturday. $10, or all three readings for $24. Reservations at 203-7874282 or longwharf.org. There will be a happy hour an hour before each reading. author. As a writer, you’ve got to show up and be ready to participate, and give as much as you can.”
Immediately following each performance, Scarfuto will moderate an audience talkback, a process that playwrights find, in various degrees, useful.
“I think it really depends where you are in the process,” said Artigue. “I think, in general, it’s worth keeping an open ear because maybe you can pick up on the consensus around your play, or someone will see something you’re not seeing.
“The other side of the coin is that playwriting, when it comes down to it, is a really subjective art form,” he said. “So what’s good ... what’s bad ... you know ... what is a play ... what isn’t a play ... is really up to the individual; so I think the trap would be to listen to everyone. You can’t listen to everybody.
“At Iowa, they taught us a trick, which is: you take a notepad up with you and you just write it all down and you nod your head,” he said. “I think that your only responsibility is just to listen.”