One of the few small venues left in the city of San Diego, 6th@Penn Theatre is producing the world premieres of four one-act plays on “off nights” in January. The diverse works, largely antiwar and anti-Bush, are billed under the collective title “War and Quiet Flowers.”
These “flowers” are anything but quiet: Their topic, the ever-increasingly unpopular war in Iraq, could not be timelier. The sympathetic audience talked back, something rare in today’s theater, where audiences, especially in larger venues, are more passive and, one suspects, more conservative.
Gathered under the aegis of Michael Thomas Tower’s Challenge Theatre, the nine-week wonder (that was the challenge) playwrights “” Jim Caputo, Jason Connors, George Soete and Matt Thompson ” are all locals. Their plays are interspersed with the poetry of Carrie Preston, whose Miramar-stationed husband is set to deploy to Iraq later this month. Brave in their honesty, the poems are delivered by Preston through Jan. 14 and by actors Julie Sachs and Leslie Gold Jan. 14-24.
Sachs portrays an Iraqi woman in Soete’s moving “Glorious Victory Street,” in which an American GI born in Iraq (the excellent Jude Evans) returns to his country, looking for long-lost family. Nick Mata plays the woman’s husband. Told in a series of short scenes, the story is gripping and real, and Soete takes the audience into a bit of amusing Hollywood excess at the end.
Connors’ “Drafted” concerns a young draftee (Christopher Buess) whose fiancée (Crystal Verdon) is a rabid antiwar protester. His father, an unbending sort, is excellently played by Ralph Johnson. Laced with comedy and ironic songs written by the multitalented Connors, the work is set in a future time when the U.S. (alone) is still in Iraq and Congress has reinstated the draft. Along with Johnson and Verdon, Jesse Mackinnon makes up a stellar trio that gets the lyrics across. Connors plays keyboards and Kevin Koppman-Gue is on percussion.
The two plays that close the evening ” Thompson’s surreal “Opera at the Oasis” and Caputo’s “Flowers of War” ” are more overtly didactic. The first “Opera at the Oasis” is a disconcerting mélange of themes and perhaps overly enamored of its own clever use of language.
Caputo’s work, set in a military cemetery and in two living rooms immediately following, concerns diverse families, one “patriotic” and the other, bitter and disheartened over presidential slogans and platitudes and the needless waste of the life of their son-husband. Sylvia Enrique’s plaintive “but where are MY grandchildren?,” delivered over an early Bush address that promised freedom to future generations, is the most poignant line of the evening.
Directed by the playwrights and certainly well-acted, the four works continue through Jan. 24, playing at 7 p.m. Sundays, and 7:30 p.m. Mondays through Wednesdays, 6th at Penn Theatre, 3704 6th Ave., Hillcrest. For tickets ($10-$12), visit [email protected] or call (619) 688-9210. Reservations recommended.
