six in one night!

"Six what?"

Six plays!

"Holy cow! How did you manage to see that many in one evening?"

Actually, they were done in less than two hours!

"That sounds highly improbable."

Gotcha! They were ten-minute plays! And I only found out about them this afternoon.

"Well, that was a major coup!"

Oh, but wait, it gets better: it was free! Just the right price for me and Boo and Kal.

"Wow. Maybe this was at a high school? I know David Poole is over at Savannah Arts Academy and I keep waiting to hear about something over there."

Yeah, me, too, but not yet. Still, you were right about it being at a school. The Jenkins Hall Theatre at GaSoU put it on, as a showcase for some of their student directors.

"How very cool! Something different for y'all! And it was over in the Black Box?"

It was! And because they hadn't advertised until today, we were the only non-students there, and there weren't many of them. Tomorrow night should have a bigger house, but this was perfect for us.

"Do you remember any of the plays?"

Well, I'd thought ahead and brought a pad and pen with me, so I took a couple of quick notes after each one. Sadly, for the first one, I wrote "Forget Me Not"... and cannot recall just what it was about.

"Hahahaha! Nice bit of irony there!"

For real, but not intended. Like I said, I was just trying to capture the essence of each during the quick set change.

"Well, that's one down, five to go."

Heard. The next one had three miners, trapped by a cave-in, and set in the 1880's. One was an old harmonic player, one was a young woman determined to find a way out, and the last was a lazy young man with a crush on the woman. There was a definite sense that none of them were destined to escape.

"That sounds pretty interesting, to have such depth in only ten minutes."

It was, and I'm sure the bfe would have liked it. I really liked the third play, mostly because it surprised me with a familiar face: Travis Spangenburg!!! "Trapped In The Pages Of A Book" had him as a fellow who'd driven off his writer girlfriend when he got jealous of the better version of him in her novel. Right? Instead of taking that as a call to be a better man, he'd insisted on carrying on as he had. Really good!

"Mister Yellow Stockings was there??? Wow!!!"

Right? I just may have gasped when I saw him! The next play featured the old miner, this time as a younger man lost between two time frames, one with "No Cigars" and the other with a pregnant wife, talking over his plight with a fellow professor. The fifth play, "New Gen Fight Club", had a solo player, the young man who'd played the wandering husband from Panama in "Intimate Apparel". He was pretty intense in this one as he berated his peers to become ready for their roles in the future, to not be content playing dishwashers and store clerks and wait staff. But it was the last play that grabbed me hard. It would have been a good one for a discussion.

"Then why didn't y'all do that? You didn't go out to eat afterward?"

No, Barbara had eaten already, and Kal doesn't spend money in restaurants. And, as they were going to her place, and I had not dined yet, we split off.

"Well, I'm here."

So you are. Okay, let's talk about "Not His Fault". It started with three young women, each taking turns at the interrogation table to explain their side of the story. I was ready for the "he did this to me" accusations of the "me, too"... but, that's not what happened. In each case, they had been 13 years old when they had their sexual encounter with the teacher. In each case, the relationship had begun with a simple interest shown by the man to the newly teen-aged girl, a relationship the girl had accepted as from a mentor. And, in each case, the girl had taken on all responsibility for the sexual encounter, choosing to believe they must have led the man on.

"But... that's not their fault. They didn't have the knowledge or experience for making such a decision at such a young age! Didn't anyone try to tell them they were innocent?"

Apparently not. There was a definite sense of them having repeated their stories many times over some period of time.

"Wow."

And let me tell you: they nailed it with their performances. Really outstanding, and just a bit sad, too, that they were able to do that. It showed both how far we've come as a society and how much still remains to be done. Definitely progress has been made, especially since these college students recognize the stance of the victim as well as that of the perpetrator.

"I agree. What an intense note to end the "Dramarama" on."

It was. Maybe tomorrow I'll go again, if I get back in time from Hinesville. Maybe. Then I'll be able to talk to the performers about these shows. Maybe.