What can you do in 10 minutes?
According to Leslie A. Barrera, the vice president of ScriptWriters/Houston, if you’re particularly skilled, you can write a play that encompasses the full arc of humanity – which is exactly what each of the ten plays selected for the 32nd Annual ScriptWriters/Houston 10×10 Play Festival do.
“Ten minutes is not a lot of time,” says Barrera, who also serves as the festival’s artistic director. “Here, we are basically thrown into the middle of the story, and we have a 10-minute view, and in that 10-minute view, we get characters that are fully fleshed out. They are faced with confrontations. They’ve got conflict, and they’re having to use their skills and their humanity to find a good resolution at the end of it. The audience is going to laugh; they’re going to cry; and, in some cases, they’re going to roll on the floor because it’s so hilarious.”
In an effort to keep local talent local, ScriptWriters/Houston seeks to provide networking opportunities, professional development, and resources to writers, with their 10×10 Play Festival being the longest-running and the oldest 10×10 festival in town. This weekend, each night of the three-night festival will showcase the work of 10 local Houston writers selected via an open call for submissions.
Though all identifying information is removed from each script before a team of evaluators reviews it, several playwrights, like Fernando Dovalina and Stephen Stewart, have had their work selected multiple times over the years. Barrera says it’s because their writing is just that good.
“If you look at different playwrighting festivals across the country, they are constantly coming up,” says Barrera. “They’re constantly traveling to go see their shows because they are so relevant. Their themes and topics are always on point…We’re very fortunate to have them as members of Scriptwriters and as advocates for full and inclusive theater in the Houston scene.”
Dovalina’s contribution to this year’s festival is Encounter in a Dorm Room, in which a young man returns to his college dorm room to find a strange man sitting there, waiting for him, on New Year’s Eve 1979.
“We get the feeling that this is out of time,” says Barrera, describing the Kelvin Douglas-directed play as “an interesting piece” with “a fun plot” that starts one way and goes in a completely different direction, leading to a “phenomenal” reveal.
“Of course, [Dovalina] always has the most insightful little nuggets to take away like…What do you wish someone had said to you at this age to change your path in life and become who you are today, which is a really relevant question right now.”
In Stewart’s Eliminating Alice, directed by Crystal Mata, two co-workers, Manny and Erika, are in the midst of an affair and worried about another co-worker, Alice, who they fear will make their jobs obsolete.
“This piece is so very now because it offers the nuance of human interaction,” says Barrera. “You’ve got the funny co-worker, the co-worker who doesn’t do anything, and then you’ve got these two co-workers who are basically revealing their most human trait of fallibility.”
Barrera adds, “I love [Stewart’s] writing because his dialogue is very funny, always, and he’s always got a twist that comes out of nowhere.”
One playwright making his festival debut is Christian Tannous with Beautiful Problem, directed by Andrew Roblyer. Tannous is already noted in town for his acting chops, and Barrera sees how his experience has informed his characters, Remy and Max, two people with history having a late-night conversation in a park.
“He reaches for the core of every character that he plays, and I really think that he put that same effort into creating Remy and Max in this show. I love that it’s very inclusive. I love that the gender fluidity is there. That it’s not just a man and a woman talking, which could be any show anywhere in any theater every night,” says Barrera.
Barrera is not only the festival’s artistic director, she’s also directing two of the plays. The subject matter of one of those plays, Potiphar’s Wife Gives Her Testimony by Lauren Tunnell, is very serious as it touches on the biblical story of Joseph (of Technicolor Dreamcoat fame) and Potiphar’s wife.
“It’s that old, ‘he said, she said,’ ‘who do you believe,’ with the two of them facing off towards the audience as the jury,” says Barrera.
Despite the themes in Potiphar’s Wife Gives Her Testimony, Barrera says that Tunnell has imbued the piece with humor.
“Tunnell really did a fantastic job of putting levity into a situation that could be very one note and very sad and very dark,” says Barrera. “She goes back and forth with their banter in such a comical way that it lightens the mood and, what might be otherwise a devastating thing to have to listen to, a triggering event, has moments of brilliant comedy.”
The goal of the festival, Barrera says, is “to be representative of our community” and feature “the different stories and different voices” with “amazing storytelling power, and an amazing number of stories that need to be told, that aren’t always told.” One play in the festival that she believes exemplifies this mission is Lemonade by Brandon McCormick.
Directed by Velvia Keithley, the play finds a young girl, Sunny, intently putting together a lemonade stand in her driveway. Though “it comes across as a very cute piece,” Barrera says it takes a turn, becoming a poignant and beautiful play about family connection.
“You would not think you would be crying about a lemonade stand. [But] it’s that connection to the actor speaking these words because the words are so emotive themselves,” says Barrera. “It’s that connection that we look for when we go to a play. We want to laugh, we want to be moved, we want to think, and I think that each of these ten shows brings that in a different way.”
The 32nd Annual ScriptWriters/Houston 10×10 Play Festival is scheduled for 8 p.m. August 22-24 at Theatre Suburbia, 5201 Mitchelldale. For more information, visit scriptwriters-houston.org. $20-$50.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
