I've seen only one play by Theresa Rebeck — the full-length one-woman comedy Bad Dates — and thought it was a bit disappointingly sitcomish, but I wouldn't say the same about this anthology of 21 of Rebeck's short-short plays. Set in a variety of everyday locations — a beach, a restaurant, a bar, the subway, an office, and so on — they're too edgy for prime time, full of Mametlike obscenities (on one page alone I counted the F-word 24 times, but that was part of the point of that piece) and often uncomfortably yet comically intense. Rebeck casts a discerning, frequently satirical eye on the way contemporary interactions go down.
These are mostly solo, two-, and three-character scenes rather than fleshed-out plays, so there's not much action or character development. But what Rebeck excels at is dialogue. In loaded conversations and monologues she captures the stumbling, stammering way people really talk to one another when under emotional pressure. In the various battles of the sexes — and of friends, strangers, roommates, and more — Rebeck reveals the desperate side of human nature. Her characters rage, bicker, snarl, and sometimes touchingly connect. You get the feeling the playwright herself has lived a lot of these scenarios.
The fact that Rebeck has also been an actor shows: The dialogue rolls naturally off the tongue, and each piece is carefully structured, bristling with conflict, subtext, and twists and turns.
Actors may also want to snap this book up because it's full of great material for audition monologues, not to mention scene work for classes. Some of the characters are actors themselves. In one playlet, The Contract, an agent informs a prospective actor client, "You guys are the lowest form of life. Oh yeah, I know everybody says that about agents, but they're wrong. I mean, we're slime, OK, I don't argue with that...." In The Actress, a character whines obsessively about a frustrating pilot season. Altogether, Rebeck's short plays offer challenging material for actors to work on, or for an enterprising theatre to assemble into a quirky, entertaining evening.
Theresa Rebeck, Smith and Kraus, 2007, paperback, 192 pages, $19.95.
