ESTAFest 2004 (Day 2 - Afternoon)
Sorry about cutting that short but I was late for dinner.
Anyway, back to our story: Well, first of all, somehow a paragraph got lost form my last post (I’m writing off-line, so it’s easier to add it here than correct it there). So, the short play “Fin & Euba”, ended about 2PM. The festival organizers wanted to start the next show immediately. However, according to the published schedule, that show wasn’t supposed to start to 3PM. The cast wasn’t ready yet, and had also told friends to come at 3PM. Hushed discussions were held, and eventually, it was decided to start at 2:30. (Actually, I think the discussions were just a delaying tactic to hold it until the cast was ready)
After the compromised break, the Bridge Players of NJ presented “The Daughter-in-Law” by DH Lawrence (A paragraph I wrote about that got lost too – This is getting odd). The play was written in a heavy British dialect which made it hard to follow. The action concerned a woman in an arranged marriage to a man who’s henpeck by his mother. The adjudicators loved the acting and set and costumes, but thought the direction lacked focus.
After dinner (the one I cut the previous entry for), we had two more shows, both exceptional short (17 minutes and 23 minutes) and both rather fluffy; they were more like skits than real “plays”. The first was called “Double Date” and was about a blind date, where the woman had multiple personalities, which manifest itself as two people, only one of whom was awake at any given time. This was not a conceit for performances — the other characters saw them as two people as well. The last was called “The Curtain Call of the Wild: The Final Bow” a farce about an actor who was shooting the rest of the cast during the curtain calls of their show.