Playwrights: Gabriella Bonamici, Gixiang Lee, Kat Blackburn. At: Pegasus Players, Truman College, 1145 W. Wilson. Tickets: 773-878-9761; www.pegasusplayers.org; $15. Runs through: Jan. 31
For 24 years Pegasus Players has conducted annual playwriting workshops in Chicago high schools, resulting in thousands of one-act plays having been written of which several score have received professional productions in Pegasus' yearly Chicago Young Playwrights Festival. This year, over 800 plays were considered for the three Festival slots. The winning playwrights, and their plays, represent the diversity for which the Festival and workshops are known.
Gabriella Bonamici's "The Nowhere People" combines comedy and drama in a work of magic realism in which an off-beat Eastern European immigrant invents a ghost machine to capture the spirit of her deceased brother, and is joined by an engineer who is a young widower with guilt feelings over his wife's death. Next, Gixiang Lee's comedy "Roller Coaster" takes a teenaged boy and girl through the highs and lows of being stuck together on a theme park ride. He's a nerd and she's more vulnerable than she pretends to be. Finally, Kat Blackburn's "deliver me from evil" ( sic ) is a complex, non-realistic voice work about an adolescent girl ( coincidentally lesbian ) overcoming issues of anger and self-worth stemming from an abusive parent.
All three plays have structural limits or flaws and none is particularly distinguished as storytelling; they all seem familiar. Bonamici doesn't explain or use the apparent European origin of Danny ( the woman's name ) , and perhaps it was a production choice that doesn't really matter. More significantly, she sets up strong expectations of Danny and Ernie ( the widower ) coalescing as a couple, which doesn't happen. The story seems incomplete. Lee's boy-girl story is a classic playwriting exercise—dissimilar people thrown together by unexpected circumstances—with their inevitable attraction and kiss predictable from the early moments of the play. Blackburn has written a largely aural piece with little inherent stage action, telling a story of survival we've heard before ( although that doesn't make it any less awful ) .
Those observations having been made, the three plays are decidedly different from one another indicating the three young writers each possess distinctive voices. Right now, their grasp of literary tools is more advanced than the depth of their storytelling ( not unexpected in writers of limited life experience ) , yet all three plays exhibit energy and charm. Bonamici and Lee both deliver some good laughs, while Blackburn's impressionistic work draws upon poetic structures to create a piece in which the chief character is represented by multiple voices and a chorus.
As always, Pegasus has brought some of the city's best directing, acting and mentoring talent to work with the young authors who are served well by the productions and the complete absence of any patronizing attitude. I'd be pleased to see/read the next works by Mss. Bonamici, Lee and Blackburn.
