Writing a play is immensely challenging. Create compelling characters? Okay! Piece together an engaging plot that captivates the audience? Sure! Map out a sufficiently lived-in world from which the magic can spring forth? I’ll try my best!
Accomplish all that in ten pages? Pass!
Well, that’s exactly what the eight playwrights whose respective works were chosen for Heartland Theatre Company’s 2024 installment of their annual 10-Minute Play Festival have done. Every year, Heartland sends out an open call for script submissions based on a central theme; recent examples include The Library, The Campout, and The Waiting Room. This year’s edition is Ghosts, and several hundred submissions were sent in from across the globe. The winning playwrights hail from five different states, from California to Florida, and from as far away as Bristol, U.K.
In each 10-Minute Play Festival, the playwrights use the given theme to investigate a wide range of issues, ideas, and emotions. Ghosts is no exception. Over the course of two hours, the audience is treated to eight unique world premieres, as each play takes them on a new adventure, one after the other, with just enough time in between to catch their breath. Audiences witness the trepidatious apparition of a deceased actress overcome her fear of moving beyond her Hollywood cemetery, the specter of an overbearing mother berating her son to find true love in the midst of a therapy session, an opportunistic theatre student trying to leverage his mid-audition death into a role as a ghost in Hamlet, and a grieving woman open up to a manifestation of her late father — who is, of course, clad in an all-white rhinestone cowboy getup. The plays that comprise Ghosts run the gamut from endearingly heartfelt to delightfully playful to frighteningly tense. In the immortal words of Ray Parker Jr., I ain’t afraid of no ghosts, but I nearly jumped out of my seat once or twice.
No play is complete without actors breathing life into it, and the ensemble put together to take these plays from the page to the stage do so with skill and alacrity. Vicky Snyder opens Ghosts on a high note in “Hollywood Forever,” as her character’s earnest and positive façade slowly slips away and she is forced to face her fear of being forgotten. In “Lonesome,” Jennifer Maloy artfully navigates the delicate balance between grief and resentment when her character confronts her mental projection of her father, who took his own life. In the same play, Anthony Pisano-Nelson’s wistful a capella singing manages to be both inviting and mournful. Gayle Hess and Jared Cantrell draw copious laughs in “The Other Side” as a purportedly blundering medium and her thoroughly unimpressed client. In “A Bottle of Boos,” Dave Lemmon and Anne White charm as a sweet ghost who lacks a natural predilection for haunting and his department supervisor who patiently explains the various haunting-adjacent opportunities available to him. Jeff Ready subtly unnerves in “The Yeti’s Claw” as an archetypical “weird uncle” who insists on quoting Poe’s “The Raven” and pressures his straight-laced brother’s family to tell ghost stories rather than sing Christmas carols. Over the course of the production, each actor makes the most of their opportunity to shine.
These actors are led by four talented veteran directors in Darlene Lloyd, Dave Montague, Lynda Rettick, and G. William Zorn, each of whom directed two of the plays. They demonstrated deft hands in guiding their respective casts, alternately applying a light touch with minimal blocking when necessary to highlight the dialogue and the actors’ performances and employing attention-grabbing technical elements to ramp up the tension where appropriate. Montague’s use of lighting, sound, and practical effects in “The Yeti’s Claw” warrants special recognition, as they elicited audible reactions from startled audience members when the play pounded toward its climax.
To facilitate eight different plays in the same space, the designers wisely simplified the design elements. Scenic designer Howard Gorman has rigged the back wall of the stage to fold open, cleverly allowing for greater variety amongst the various sets. Costume designer Clatie Fischer has ensured the actors’ garments facilitate each story without pulling focus unnecessarily. Jesse Folks’s lighting design effectively establishes the proper ambiance for each play. In addition to directing, Montague also designed the sound for Ghosts, and his wide-ranging and eclectic interstitial music choices caught my ear on multiple occasions. A link to the playlist of the music used before, during, and after the performance is included in the program — it is worth a listen!
Central Illinois enjoys a vibrant community theatre scene, and the 10-Minute Play Festival is a shining example of what that scene has to offer. Heartland’s commitment to fostering new works is highly commendable. The creativity on display, from the playwrights to the performers to the production team, is a joy to behold. Ghosts continues for the next two weekends so head over to Normal to enjoy the world premiere of these intriguing new works.
Ghosts: Ten-Minute Play Festival
Heartland Theatre Company
1110 Douglas St — One Normal Plaza
Normal
June 6-8 + 13-14, 7:30 p.m.
June 9th, 2 p.m.
June 15th, 2 + 7:30 p.m.
$10-$19