These days if we don’t like a movie or TV show we’re watching it’s pretty easy to switch the channel (or streaming service) and find something else. It’s a bit harder to do that with live theater. So how can theater companies try to entice and satisfy that channel-flipping tendency of today’s culture? Infinity Stage’s Steven Rodgers had an idea.
The 10 x 10 x Infinity Short Comedy Play Festival is a new event produced by Infinity Stage that will feature 10, 10-minute plays from 10 playwrights all coming one right after the other.
“We have such an instant gratification society, I figure, [and] if you have 10 shows maybe one isn’t your cup of tea but there’s another one coming up in a few minutes and something is bound to tickle your fancy,” says Rodger, Infinity’s founder and artistic director.
Rodgers says that he received more than 350 submissions from around the world for the festival but went with 10 from American playwrights: Bard Beyond Belief by Tony Pelham; The Bench by Paula Fell; Black Friday by David MacGregor; Bridge and Tunnel by Anne Flanagan; FaceTime by Donna Hoke; I Got You, Babe by Anthony L. Mariani; Just That Sort of Day by Lawson Caldwell; Regifting by Steven Korbar; The Surprise by Michael Perlmutter; and The Unfortunate Teller by Jeff Dunne.
Local Northern Virginia actors and directors are serving as the talent for these performances, including Colin Davies, a local actor and host of a weekly radio program on “Radio Fairfax.”
The goal for this new festival is to make audiences aware that there are new plays out there; it’s not all Shakespeare and Hamilton. Though some of the plays may have been performed at regional theaters, Rodgers describes the 10 selected plays as “obscure works.”
“What I would really love to see is that people can come to something they never heard before and walk away thinking, ‘Wow, I’m missing out on a lot of new stuff,’” says Rodgers. “Because it’s human nature, we kind of want to go with what we know. But when you do that you miss out on 95 percent of what is out there.”
The 10 x 10 x Infinity Short Comedy Play Festival will take place April 20-21 at the Epicure Café. A mixer will be held at 7 p.m. with performances scheduled to begin at 8 p.m.
