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Michael Dempsey's short plays at theater
By GUY D’ASTOLFO
YOUNGSTOWN
Playwright/director Michael Dempsey is bringing seven of his short plays to the local stage.
Titled “An Evening in Michael Dempsey’s Shorts!,” the show will be presented for a two-weekend run as part of Rust Belt Theater’s summer series of original works.
Dempsey talked about the plays in this question-and-answer session:
Q. Is it really called ‘An Evening in Michael Dempsey’s Shorts!”?
A. Absolutely! I figured it was a quick, fun way to captures the offbeat, comic nature of my writing and also let people know who wrote and directed this collection of short pieces.
Q. Tell me a little about the plays. Which ones have already been produced?
A. Three of them (“Unabridged,” “Leave It At The Office,” “The Perfection of Strangerhood”) have been produced variously in New York and Los Angeles, regionally at Actors Theatre of Louisville, in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere in other collections and comedy festivals. “Unabridged” was one of the first things I wrote and was responsible for getting me a staff position as a network comedy writer. Three of the pieces were written especially for this Rust Belt show and are world premieres. In total, they’re a nice retrospective of the writing I’ve done over the past 25 years; they range from some wild farce to more character-based comedies. Also a couple nutty monologues, and a couple that are more Saturday Night Live-style sketches. One of them is more serious and lyrical — it’s kind of a memory play. It’s been a blast revisiting some of these; some, I’m directing myself for the first time.
Q. The shorts seem to be snapshots of everyday people in unusual situations. Tell me about them.
A. I’m attracted to characters who get fixated on something — we all have our quirks, and it’s our obsessions and unusual needs that cause us to overreact to the world — and this is a great platform to build comedy on. A lot of the pieces are about people trying to connect, but a combination of their own issues, and the craziness of modern culture, gets in the way and causes their efforts to come out distorted and comic.