Chelsea Marcantel’s examination of group dynamics within an Amish community, when it is subjected to both the external shock of an outsider committing a careless deadly act as well as the eruption of casual, intimate violence between two of its members, is called Everything Is Wonderful, a title with irony as solid as a horse. Telling one of its stories through fragments of the past and present, it follows Jessica Savage’s Miri, a young young Amish girl who leaves the community under a cloud and seeks a way to return. Savage masters the younger Miri’s innocence, her older self’s sarcasm, and her constant headstrong feistiness. Paul DeBoy is the stolid Jacob, Miri’s father. Director Ed Herendeen, festival helm, puts the expansive Frank Center performance space to excellent use, composing effective stage pictures while managing a couple of the script’s messier technical challenges.
The spine of this piece is a remark by Jacob (helpfully reprinted in the program book: “Forgiveness is a choice. It happens in an instant. Reconciliation is a journey.”
We Will Not Be Silent, by David Meyers, picks up the case of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose resistance movement in 1943’s Germany. An imagining of the interrogation of Sophie (the delicate Lexi Lapp) during the shockingly short period of time between her arrest and her trial and execution (five days), the play zeroes in on the question of conscience vs. self-preservation. Like Arthur Miller’s John Proctor, Meyers’ Sophie vacillates between signing a confession, a mere tissue of words, and maintaining her integrity. Her interrogator is the urbane Kurt Grunwald (Paul DeBoy, again), who can play good cop against his own bad cop. He lets a simple line like “I see” hang in the air like a dagger.
Lest readers infer that playwright Meyers approaches this material from the same point on the political spectrum as Miller, be advised that he is a former intern in the George W. Bush White House.
The title town of Evan Linder’s Byhalia, Mississippi lies just southeast of Memphis, and it earned a page in this history of American civil rights with the shooting of Butler Young, Jr. in 1974, the exoneration of his killer, and an ensuing backlash. Linder’s play, set in the present day, looks at the dysfunctional marriage of Laurel and Jim, a young white couple trying to get by, while the town’s history echoes all around.
- Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
- Everything Is Wonderful, by Chelsea Marcantel, directed by Ed Herendeen
- We Will Not Be Silent, by David Meyers, directed by Ed Herendeen
- Byhalia, Mississippi, by Evan Linder, directed by Marc Masterson