Red Door Studios, which brought the Spa City the highly entertaining "Derby Day" during last year's Arts & The Park Festival, is back again this year offering an evening of fast-paced live theater, ranging from comedy to drama and the bizarrely absurd to biting political satire.
The inaugural Arkansas One-Acts, which opens tonight, features seven plays, all written by native Arkansans, ranging in length from the shortest at 5 minutes to the longest at 15 minutes, with "most around the 10-minute mark," Zachary Powers, executive director of Red Door and producer of the play, said Thursday during a dress rehearsal.
Red Door put out the call for short plays in January and received 28 submissions from 22 Arkansas playwrights, selecting seven which were announced in mid-February, with auditions starting immediately and rehearsals beginning in March with 14 cast members.
Powers said the criteria they used to select the winning plays included "producibility," since the format and time frame only allowed for fairly stripped-down and simple productions, and length. "We didn't really want seven 20-minute plays because that would be just too long a show."
They also eliminated any that involved children because "we didn't want to do that," and many of the plays involve adult language and themes so the show is "for adults only," he said, noting, "Taking out the ones that were too long or too short or had children narrowed it down quite a bit."
Then he had a three-member screening committee who each "put in for the ones they liked the most" and the seven were chosen. Some of the cast members appear only once while some appear in two or three of the plays.
While most of the plays are comedies, similar to the skits on "Saturday Night Live," one "Picture It," written by Jim Miller, is "more of a tried and true drama," while one is "definitely absurd" and another is "borderline absurd."
Betsey Ledbetter, who acts in three of the plays, said the production was challenging, "playing two completely different characters, with different hairstyles and costumes, you really have to shift gears quickly."
She noted one play she was in, "Sniper," written by John Vanderslice, was especially challenging.
"Memorizing the lines for that one and not getting off track was difficult. It's an absurd play and finding your own meaning for it was a challenge," she said. "As we were rehearsing it, it initially made no sense but it takes on a meaning as you go. It's very serious and dark in a way."
Powers said he recruited an experienced director, Andrea McDaniel, who had approached them previously because she was studying theater and nonprofit management at Henderson State University and took an interest in Red Door.
"It's been great for us because she has been able to funnel a lot of the talent from HSU to us. A lot of the cast she brought to us and we had wanted to get in that realm but never had a good solid way to get in."
McDaniel said she has directed full-length plays and short plays before but had never tackled seven at once. "You put a lot into a 10-minute play, the same as a long play. With this, you had seven times the costumes, seven times the rehearsals, seven times the everything."
The pacing of the plays is fast, with minimal stage changes, allowing for smooth transitions. The comedies range from the silly to the bizarre with social, political and sexual relationships all fair game. There is a "Twilight Zone" feeling to a few of the entries and lots of laugh out loud moments from the talented cast.
The other plays featured are "There She Is" and "Date Four," both written by J. Jacob Whisenant; "Identity Crisis" by Powers; "Homeland Security ... in My Pants" by Shua Miller; and "Go To ..." by Bob May.
Besides Ledbetter and McDaniel, who acts in one of the plays, other cast members include: Ben Perry, Jack Higginbotham, Jess Phelps, Matt White, Irvin Slate, Mathia Robinson, Jacey Russell, Shaina Tippitt, Jason Moore, Zachery Ingersoll, Emily Parker and Thomas Cooper.
Performances are at 7:30 p.m. today, Sunday, and May 5-8 at Low Key Arts, 118 Arbor St., in Hot Springs. Tickets are available for purchase online at www.prekindle.com/events/reddoorstudios for $10 plus a fee or $15 at the door, cash only.
Local on 04/30/2016