OK, so I don’t write a message for 6 months. But you can always count on a good ESTA Festival to get me talking.
This year it is being held in Delaware – just about the same length of drive as the Maryland one last year (Hate to think where their gonna send us next year — New York or Pennsylvania.
After a rather uneventful drive down, and a quick check in to the hotel, I wasted about 20 minutes driving around trying to find the theater. I was trying to get there in time for a workshop at 3:30. I ended up getting there about 3:50 ( which was actually pretty good time since I left home at 12:50). Not that it mattered — the schedule I was looked at was from last year. There apparently aren’t any workshops this year.
So, I hung around ‘til 5:00pm, when there was a reception – free food, but a cash bar (including sodas for a buck each). And, other than some quiche, the food was all meat, which I don’t eat on Fridays. After a while, I strolled around the corner, and got a slice of pizza.
At 7PM, the theater stuff actually started. As an “opening act”, they has a Dame Edna impersonator, who joked about theater, the states represented and such for about twenty minutes. Then, finally, was the first show of the festival — Triple Threat (of Cherry Hill) performing “Proof” quite nicely cut down to the required hour. The first adjudicator just raved about it. The next two were quite positive, even if they didn’t gush quite as much as the first.
After them, a troupe from Pennsylvania present 4 bits from “Febraury 14 and other Plays” — Hard to describe them without giving away too many of the surprises in the stories. All four were two character piece for a man & woman (although one was changed to two men — I didn’t learn that until after seeing it; it would probably seem very different with that character as a woman). The adjudicators, while still positive, were a bit more restrained this time. So, the early line is, New Jersey is leading….