The 10-minute play phenomenon has swept the country. Last week, if festivals in Durango and Albuquerque prove anything, the short-form theatrical evening is here to stay.
The Durango Arts Center launched its 14th festival over Memorial Day weekend. Redesigning its two-tier format over the last 13 years, the DAC presented eight fully-staged plays in three performances. Last weekend, Albuquerque’s Fusion Theatre Company put on The Seven in its 18th annual Short Works Festival and performed to full houses for all nine performances.
Founded in 2001, Fusion is a sprawling downtown arts and cultural center on a 35,000-square-foot campus with multiple venues including indoor and outdoor performance spaces. Fusion also hosts 18 resident artists and serves as a fiscal sponsor to fledgling community organizations. Fusion is what DAC could become with a broader vision that it once had, one that might embrace the cultural life of the whole community.
DAC’s effort this year to reconfigure its 10-minute play festival is a step in the right direction. The selection process has been streamlined. Gone is an outdated playwright entrance fee, a model other American theaters have never used or abandoned. DAC presented each playwright a royalty fee.
DAC drew on Durango’s largely amateur talent pool for directors and actors, and delivered a crisp evening of short works. Thankfully gone is the old popularity-contest atmosphere.
Steven Martin’s “The Springboard” opened the evening with an homage to the creative process. Whitney R. Garrity’s “Fair Enough” delivered a one-note mystery about two guys on the road with a secret in the trunk. Angele Maraj’s “Tell Me a Story,” presented a complex, difficult-to-stage tale about the power of storytelling. Steven Korbar’s witty “The Thread Count in Hades” offered a fresh take on an old myth with a contemporary American spin.
Craig Gustafson’s “It Is What It Is” untangled a marital knot with the help of an HOA. Tom Cavanaugh’s “Man from Mayhem” spun an argument over a street corner dilemma. Laurie Allen’s “Something Borrowed” ladled humor onto another relationship drama. And Philip Raymond Brown’s “The Orb” capped the evening with a TV Newscast format with an otherworldly twist.
Albuquerque’s Fusion Festival would be expected to mount an evening of seven short works with a certain panache. Founded in 2001, Fusion is New Mexico’s longest-lived professional theater company. Fusion didn’t disappoint.
Lisa Dellagiarino Feriend’s “The Unexpected Delight of Snowbirds” opened the evening by offering a two-hander about an older couple facing the holidays after a death in the family. Several unexpected turns led to a quiet and gratifying resolution.
Rex McGregor’s “The Name of Action” used the festival prompt, Uninvited Guests, with a quirky Hamlet throughline by heightening an improbable situation with physical comedy. Somehow, it worked.
Curt Strickland’s “Speed Dating” served up a familiar relationship trope. Superb acting made it new.
Cherielyn Ferguson’s “Fair Play” transported Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet to a modern marriage bureau complete with a bored bureaucrat. Lighting, sound effects and terrific acting made it sizzle.
Jen Silverman’s “The Visitations” illuminated the prompt with fine writing and pitch-perfect acting.
Guy Newsham’s “A Flicker,” took a grief drama in a new direction benefiting again from excellent acting.
Joyce Fontana’s “Sticky Notes,” wrapped up the evening in a richly rewarding finale. Fontana is a Durango playwright with a medical background, and her newest play took a fresh approach to the Uninvited Guest prompt.
Dennis Gromelski, Fusion’s executive director, said Fontana’s play was selected as the top play in 2024. Out of a field of approximately 550 scripts, first screened by Rachel Wiseman then juried by a panel of theater professionals, the Bradford Gromelski Jury Award Winner was arrived at through a scoring system. Fontana was invited to Albuquerque to attend the opening.
At the end, Gromelski introduced Fontana to the audience and invited her to the stage. She has immersed herself in playwrighting as a “second act” retirement gig after decades in health care. She encouraged audience members to expand their love for theater by creating work for companies like Fusion.
Judith Reynolds is an arts journalist and member of the American Theatre Critics Association.
