Ballard’s plucky Live Girls! normally makes good theater. This
edition of Quickies features many actors, writers, and
directors who have done fine work with very little money illustrating
complex emotions and concepts in productions like Fall Off
Night and 800 Words. It’s shocking that the end result
here is so atrocious.
Of the six short plays that make up the show, the best is the first:
Yog Sothoth, an
H. P. Lovecraft–meets–The
Stepford Wives lark written by Lia Romeo. It’s funny and loose and
just menacing enough to work. Unfortunately, it’s also the shortest
play of the night, and it feels almost like a trailer for a longer
production. Things never improve. From the who-cares Southern gothic of
Your Roaring Blood to the feels-like-an-acting-class-exercise
of A Little Test, the plays occasionally brush against the
bottom of mediocre before hurtling downward into the depths of bad-play
hell. It’s tough to watch two plays—Apricot Supernovas and 24 Pictures of a Pilot—that could be interesting
with much more work and care get squashed into this mess.
It doesn’t help that the whole thing is hosted by Shermona Mitchell.
Mitchell doesn’t talk about the contents of the plays at all, or tie
the evening together. Instead she brings the cast out to do
interstitial stupid human tricks, like juggling and beatboxing. It
gives the whole affair the cheap feeling of a student-run improv night,
a poor decision when half of the plays aren’t comedies. As soon as it
started, I wanted to leave, and as soon as I left, I wanted to forget.
