10x10 fest another midwinter winner
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — The influence of the past on the present informs most of the works in this year’s edition of Barrington Stage Company’s always-excellent 10x10 New Play Festival, an annual tradition that packages 10 plays, all about 10 minutes in length, into a funny, smart, engaging two hours in the theater.
Half of the plays are directed by Alan Paul, Barrington Stage’s new artistic director, the others by veteran Berkshires director Matthew Penn. The cast of six, half of whom are making their BSC debuts, assumes roles as varied as a medieval jester and scientist, a long-married couple, a younger couple celebrating their anniversary, an aspiring magician and a bored 20-something who discovers how much he has in common with a female neighbor 50 years his senior.
By necessity, nearly all of the plays are built on a single idea or conceit. In “Right Field of Dreams” by Stephen Kaplan, a 10-year-old baseball player (Skyler Gallun) is inspired by the ghost of a Negro League star (Camille Upshaw) to tell his coach-father (Matt Neely, a 10-year 10x10 veteran) why he doesn’t like the game. “Anything You Want” by Arlene Jaffe puts a student journalist (Sky Marie) into the Stockbridge studio of illustrator Norman Rockwell (Robert Zukerman, eight 10x10s). Zukerman returns in the festival’s most touching work, “If I Go First,” by Michael Brady, playing opposite the reliably superb Peggy Pharr Wilson, who has been in all 13 10x10s, as husband-and-wife seniors facing end-of-life decisions. The most ambitious work, Michael Burgan’s “All Aboard!,” ends the show with five cast members on a train for a head-spinning riff on physics, time and space.
Past festival themes have included deception (2022), contemporary social anxieties (2020) and otherness (2017). The overall shaping of the latest 10x10 links the plays without pushing too hard on memory and nostalgia, as when Gallun and Wilson bond over heavy metal at a bus stop in “Gimme Shelter” by Robert Weibezahl or when a couple played by Gallun and Marie discover that checking into a haunted hotel room is more creepy than fun.
While there’s much pleasure to be had in watching the assured skill of Neely, Wilson and Zukerman, with a combined three decades of 10x10s among them, the newcomers are real finds, especially the sunny, open-faced Marie and Gallun, a live-wire of a comedic actor here whose Shakespeare-heavy resumé suggests he’s adept in classic drama, too.
Disappointingly for those who don’t already have tickets, the rest of the run is essentially sold out, with six tickets total available as of Monday morning for the four performances that aren’t already full. Set yourself a reminder for the fall to determine when tickets go on sale for 10x10 next February.