Alexandra Benton, 22, has graduated from college with a degree in biology. Instead of going out into the world and getting a so-called real job, as her parents wish, she continues to work as a barista at a coffee shop called The Steamed Bean.
Sound familiar?
It should – even with the slightly altered name of a real Durango business.
The Steamed Bean is the site of Alexandra’s highest aspirations in a contemporary comedy by Cleveland-based playwright and Fort Lewis College alumnus Eric Coble. “A Girl’s Guide to Coffee” opens Friday on the Mainstage at Fort Lewis and will run only two weekends.
Smart, witty and brimming with interesting characters, “Girl’s Guide” happens to have been written by a Fort grad with a string of credentials any American playwright would be proud of.
Born in Scotland, Coble grew up on the Navajo and Ute Indian reservations until he enrolled at Fort Lewis as an English major. He went on to get a master’s in acting from Ohio University. Now in his mid-40s, Coble is affiliated with the Cleveland Play House and has had plays produced there, at regional theaters across the country, as well as on and off Broadway.
“We’re thrilled to be staging ‘Girl’s Guide,’” Felicia Meyer said in a recent interview. Meyer is directing the comedy and noted it was the Alumni Office that alerted the department about Coble’s work and career.
They sent department chair Dennis Elkins a note, she said, and, “He looked Eric up and jumped on it.”
Auditions took place in early September, Meyer said, and the six-member cast immediately plunged into rehearsals.
The play opens as Alex (Molly Quinn) rhapsodizes about a former barista who achieved perfection creating lattes – then suddenly disappeared. It’s a two-pronged dilemma that puzzles Alex and informs her search for meaning and connection.
As the play unfolds, so does Alex’s world: her roommate Samantha (Ashley Williford), her boss Donny (Wyatt Grice), her parents (Allie Boom and Avery Scott) and Christopher (Austin Minard). Some of the actors play multiple parts, creating the atmosphere of The Steamed Bean, a college room, a bar and Alex’s home.
“We’ll perform on a minimal stage,” Meyer said, noting multiple settings and the general fluidity of the play’s structure.
“A Girl’s Guide” premiered in 2009 at Boise Contemporary Theater in Idaho. It happens to be Part I of a trilogy informally referred to as The Alexandra Plays.
In a 2013 interview for Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., Coble noted his early interest in writing about “an artistic, smart woman at two ends of life.” Coble’s “The Velocity of Autumn” (Part III in the trilogy) opened on Broadway in 2014, starring Estelle Parsons as an elderly Alex and Stephen Spinella as her adult son.
After Coble wrote the bookends, he said he wondered about what Alex was like in the middle and completed the trilogy with “Stranded on Earth,” where Alex is in her 40s.
Having read “A Girl’s Guide to Coffee” and looking forward to the FLC production this weekend, I hope the college will eventually produce the entire trilogy. The writing is that good.
jreynolds@durangoherald.com. Judith Reynolds is a Durango writer, art historian and arts journalist.
