Middlesex Arts: This Could Be the Start of Something Big

Good theater engages its audience, and an annual play festival by Crossroads Theatre Company gives audience members the opportunity to talk directly with playwrights about their newest works.

The Genesis Festival of New Plays and Voices has been staged at the New Brunswick theater for more than 20 years and one of the reason it works, according to the company’s artistic director, is the opinions and insights people bring to the staged readings.

"What I’ve noticed over the years it that they can challenge the playwright and really ask some very probing questions that can be of great value to their growth and development,” says Marshall Jones.

Four plays will receive staged readings during the festival, which runs May 27-29. Readings are followed by a Q&A with the playwrights and a more casual wine and cheese reception. And Marshall says, the writers better be ready to hear some feedback.

“I tell the playwrights, “Your job is to listen, so practice nodding your head,’” he says. “’I know it can be tough, particularly if they’re criticizing something you just gave birth to, but if you’re spending time arguing your point or defending your point, that means there’s less time you’re getting other comments in and that could be a comment that could cause a light bulb moment.’”

The four plays taking stage are all vastly different in their subjects, but share a common bond in that they find new ways to tell stories, according to Marshall. Benjamin Bettenbender’s “Swordplay,” for example, combines two very different stories, one about a young swordsman seeking a master in feudal Korea and another about a desperate man who seeks help from his loan shark friend.

“It’s a departure in some ways and in some ways it’s not, because one of the things that Ben can capture really well in his writing is the spirit of the underdog,” Jones says. “He could have written ‘Rocky.’ He just can get an audience on the side of that underdog without (doing so in) a melodramatic kind of way.”

In a full production, choreographed fight scenes will be a big part of the play, but they featured in the staged readings. “One of the great things about doing readings is that the play gets visualized in the minds of the audience,” Marshall says.

Bettenbender says the play came about because he wanted to do something light and fun and wanted to write a play with staged combat in it. But the story ended up getting deeper than he originally planned.

“As I was trying to develop the characters so that the story isn’t just tacked on but is organic to what I’m try to do, their stories went deeper and deeper,” he says. “And the only way I could come up with portraying the event I wanted to portray required that I kind of come up with a different approach, a sort of split reality.”

Bettenbender has a connection to New Brunswick because his father, John Bettenbender, was the founding dean of the Mason School of Arts at Rutgers.

“I was fortunate enough to be around Mason Gross when they were forming this theater,” Bettenbender says. “I remember Crossroads’ first seasons very well.”

He became a successful playwright, several of his plays are performed regularly, but stepped away from theater for a while to raise a family. He was invited to a recent Crossroads celebration and met with Jones and Ricardo Kahn, one of the founders of Crossroads.

“When I went back, Rick was there and Marshall was there and I was talking with everybody and heard people reminisce about it,” he says. “It inspired me, what a beautiful vision they have and what a great collection of artists.”

Zoey Martinson’s play “Ndebele Funereal” was inspired by an encounter the playwright./actress had with a refugee in South Africa. “I won’t necessarily say it’s about her experiences, but what it does is share what she experienced in a real, meaningful way,” Jones says.

In the play, a bright, mixed race 30-year-old woman has contracted AIDS and heads to a refugee camp in Soweto. She’s given wood to build a new home with, but uses it instead to make a coffin. When a white South African official comes looking for her, inquiring about the wood, she pretends to be someone else and sends him on a wild goose chase. The scene is played for laughs according to Jones.

“There’s also something else about these plays in that there’s a lot of humor in all of them, even if the subject matter might seem a little morbid or deep,” he says.

Even torture gets farcical in Geoff Newton’s “Absolution,” about two English prisoners, one a cab driver, the other an Iranian immigrant who is a doctor but in England runs a bodega. They are soon tortured as songs like “Splish Splash” are played.

“You actually see it but because it goes into a farcical realm it’s not as dramatic as I guess the show ‘24’ would be,” Jones says of the torture scene. “The interrogators are interrogating both men and are asking all kinds of questions, and it’s fascinating how the stories of their lives unfold.”

The final play, Gena Bardwell’s “Inside Outside” follows a woman whose husband died in a car crash. But she’s not ready to let go and has visions of them still being together. Her husband was the driver of the car and the accident left her son-in-law in a coma, creating a strain between the woman and her daughter.

Amazingly, this story is a comedy, according to Jones, who compares it to Beth Henley’s ‘Crimes of the Heart,’ which got laughs out of serious topics like a woman shooting her husband.

“It’s not quite as extreme as ‘Crimes of the Heart,’ but it has that kind of humor and pathos,” Jones says. “The wife has a best friend who comes in and provides a lot of comic relief, you see banter going back and forth between the husband and the wife that’s really interesting. She actually talks to him sometimes when other people are there. The audience will obviously be in on that and it can be kind of funny.”

At the center of the play, he says, is the relationship between the mother and the memory of her husband.

“The first scene is a wonderful scene, very, very sensual, very tender, of this middle aged African American couple, just sharing a Sunday afternoon, then the daughter comes and you realize this is just a dream,” Jones says.

Over the years, the festival has seen some plays go on to be performed professionally, including George C. Wolfes “Spunk,” Anna Deveare Smith’s “Dream,” as well as works by Ntozoke Shange, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis.

“I just hope people come out and support these playwrights because you never know,” Jones says. “Lynn Nottage, who won a Pulitzer Prize, had one of her plays done here back in the ‘80s, so you just never know.”

The Genesis Festival of New Plays and Voices will be staged at Crossroads Theatre, 7 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick, May 27-29. Tickets cost $15. For tickets and information, call 732-545-8100 or go to www.crossroadstheatrecompany.com.