If you ask Mimi Holloway, the artistic director of Theatre Southwest, to choose between a ten-minute play and a 20-minute play, the answer is obvious.
“A 20-minute play is so different from ten minutes and, to me, it’s a lot more satisfying,” says Holloway. “In 20 minutes, you can develop something and in ten minutes, you really just have to go wham and present what you have.”
And Holloway should know. She’s producing the 26th Annual Festival of Originals – in fact, she’s produced all 26.
The festival, affectionately nicknamed FOO, features five one-act, 20-minute-long plays, each with its own director and its own cast.
Holloway says when the festival started out, they received about 50 scripts. Now, they get around 800 from playwrights around the world. Other than trying to balance the selections so there’s a mix of comedy and drama, Holloway notes that they deliberately try to avoid having a theme.
“We just basically try to pick an entertaining five,” says Holloway.
Once Holloway narrows it down to “an eclectic group of plays” and recruits five directors, she asks the directors to list, in order, which show they’d like. This year, she adds that all five participating directors are FOO pros who have done the festival multiple times.
After the shows are assigned a director, two days of open auditions follow, and at the end of the second day, she and the directors get together to decide on the casts.
“Mostly I just listen and they get to argue amongst themselves,” says Holloway, adding that “with very few exceptions” it tends to go very peacefully. “I’m always surprised at that.”
Rehearsals then commence, with everyone present and Holloway in charge for the final seven.
“That’s when we try to coordinate things and make sure it turns into one show rather than five different scenes,” says Holloway. “What I tell everyone at the very beginning and at the very end: This is a show, and if they go away just liking your [play] we failed and you failed.”
This year’s selected playwrights are a little more Texan and the plays a little more comedic than they have been in quite a while, and though Holloway says it wasn’t on purpose, she’s glad to see it.
The first of three Texans (and two Houstonians) to make this year’s FOO is Fernando Dovalina, and it’s the second year in a row that the former assistant managing editor of the Houston Chronicle has been selected for the festival.
“When he retired he took up playwriting, and it appears he’s quite good at it,” says Holloway.
In Dovalina’s Imaginary Friends, directed by Jay Menchaca and and starring Joshua Figuerra, Reijon Liboon and Helen Warwick, a young man visits a fortune teller seeking help in finding his imaginary friend from childhood.
Holloway shares that the fortune teller, “a wonderful character” played by Warwick, is fairly pragmatic in a “you’re nuts” kind of way. Careful to avoid spoilers, she does say that “there’s a little twist of an ending” and that “happiness prevails.”
In New Yorker Denis Meadows’s play, two men (played by Alonso Prusmack and Reijon Liboon) are small-time crooks with a bag of stolen money. They are dressed as priests and riding on a ferry in New York.
Unfortunately for them, in the aptly titled At Sea, Two Guys in Clerical Guise directed by David Hymel, the two criminals encounter a suspicious woman (Hayley Beiermeister) on the ferry who wouldn’t mind a little money of her own.
Holloways calls The Matchmaker, a comedy from Houstonian (and Pastor) Mindy Roll and directed by Vicky McCormick, “contemporary clever,” saying Roll took an “almost trite subject” – online dating – and added a twist: The woman, Carol (Alice Rhoades), is an older divorcee seeking the help of Madison (Annabelle Evans), a twentysomething dating app expert who usually caters to Gen Zers.
On the flip side, Austinite Marla Porter’s Moonrise is more serious and “a little harder to describe,” according to Holloway.
Directed by Justin Holloway, the play is about two brothers (Lance Stodghill and Shawn Havranek) at odds in life who encounter a moon goddess (Pam Pankratz) in death.
“The moon goddess scenes are lovely,” says Holloway. “[Pankratz] was born to be a moon goddess. I mean this was her destiny.”
Again, reluctant to say too much, Holloway does say that Moonrise “doesn’t turn out the way you completely think, but they reunite in their own way.”
Finally, playwright Johanna Beale Keller of DeWitt, New York, is bringing the physical comedy to the festival with Look, where it comes again! directed by Steve Carpentier.
Here, three actors (Lisa Caughorn, Alexis Munoz and Keri Wolfe) in a small Shakespearean troupe await the arrival of a world-renowned director who will lead them through their rehearsal for Hamlet. But, in a classically Shakespearean case of mistaken identity, the actors encounter a truck driver, played by Cindy Lou Parker, who they think is their visiting director.
“They get the truck driver to give them advice on acting,” says Holloway, and – surprise, she’s not exactly an expert. “They ask her about ‘aside,’ which she’s never heard of, and she says, ‘for a side, well, I guess the best side is potatoes’ and then they all act like potatoes.”
If you, like us, are wondering what it means to act like a potato, Holloway has a simple answer.
“Come and find out.”
Performances of The Festival of Originals are scheduled for July 28-August 12 at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sunday, August 6, at Theatre Southwest, 8944-A Clarkcrest. For more information, visit tswhouston.com. $20-$22.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
