Barrington Stage’s 10x10 fest a reliable winter treat
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — In one short play, a 20something sex therapist tries to help a senior couple have a zestier bedroom encounter. In another, six birders hike Mount Greylock in search of an elusive osprey. In a third, a woman in a bridal gown climbs through the second-floor window of her ex-boyfriend’s place in hopes of avoiding her wedding to someone else.
Barrington Stage Company’s annual 10x10 festival of short plays — 10 in all, each running 10 minutes or less — is always a highlight of the winter season. Performed by a cast of six, half of whom have performed in at least eight 10x10s, the 13-yearold festival runs through March 10 on BSC’S smaller St. Germain Stage. Among the playwrights, five have had shorts in 10x10 in past seasons, including Brent Askari, whose full-length plays “Andy Warhol in Iran” and “American Underground” had main-stage productions by the Pittsfield company in 2022 and 2019, respectively.
Alan Paul, who is approaching his second summer as artistic director, splits directing duties with veteran TV and stage director Matthew Penn, who has been part of eight previous 10x10s. Together
they create a complete package of plays that feels shorter than its running time of just under two hours, accomplished by the fact that each work is by necessity driven by a single idea.
As in past years, a common theme loosely connects the plays. Last year it was nostalgia, with previous themes of deception (2022), contemporary social anxieties (2020) and otherness (2017). Linking the new works this time is intergenerational communication, with the festival coincidentally opening on the same weekend as The New York Times published a large story in which researchers warned that the decline of interactions among generations is a “dangerous experiment.”
Many of the 10x10 plays explore the theme in explicit ways. James Mcclindon’s sweet, gentle “Snow Falling Faintly” finds a mother and son in their driveway, shovels in hand, as they navigate a relationship now bereft of the family’s father. A playwright in “A Doubt My Play,” by Glenn Alterman, is beset by alternating fantasies of criticism and praise until his father
breaks the spell. Mark Evan Chimsky puts a young gay Jewish writer in conflict with a legendary writer born generations before in an Eastern European shtetl in the painful “Finding Fingerman.”
Others are more oblique, as in Jennifer Maisel’s “The Welcome,” when the unclear reason for a young woman’s visit to a stranger’s home is revealed, giving the play
the most immediate political relevance in the 10x10. A man of indeterminate age, sitting on a bench and talking to an unseen person, occupies “Can I Tell You a Story?” by Christopher Oscar Pena. The festival’s most challenging work, it defies easy summary but is nonetheless potent in its evocation of a fleeting youth long past.
The actors are Gisela
Chipe, Ross Griffin, Matt Neely, Peggy Pharr Wilson, Naire Poole and Robert Zukerman. Despite the brevity of the plays, they often imbue their multiple characters with rich individuality when warranted, their humanity no less full during the short time we get to know them. The economy of the writing in 10x10 is as noteworthy as the authors’ creativity.