Playwright: Anita Chandwaney, Angeli Primlani, Pushkar Sharma At: Rasaka Theatre Company, in conjunction with Premiere Theatre & Performance, at Strawdog Theatre, 3829 N. Broadway. Phone: 312-777-1070; $20. Runs through: Sept 6
The Rasaka-sponsored playwrighting workshop in 2008 yielded 10 10-minute plays, reduced eventually for full production to three. Somewhere in the development process, however, one of the scripts grew to nearly six times its original length, swelling the running time on Culture/Clash to one and a half hours, while the other two appear to have reached the stage substantially unchanged.
Angeli Primlani’s Night Shift presents us with the single-mother desk clerk at a truck-stop motel and the East Indian owner’s tween daughter, who rescues the adult woman from the unsavory attentions of a customer. Thus does gender solidarity triumph over ethnic differences in the most structured narrative of our anthology. And in Instant Recall, Anita Chandwaney brings together a British bachelor and an Indian matron seeking to resolve a contretemps occurring after the ocean cruise they have undergone with no visible escort. After much confusion—and in both stagings, time wasted orienting ourselves to our milieu—one of the solitary tourists reveals a secret, so briefly as to barely register on our consciousness.
The bulk of the evening, however, is taken up with Pushkar Sharma’s Midnite’s Vultures, which asks us to accept the premise of two strangers meeting on Craigslist agreeing to spend their first date doing heavy hallucinogenics in a remote Native American cemetery and swapping op-eds on their respective “Indian” heritages. Our suspension of disbelief is also to extend to peyote being water-soluble, requiring continued ingestion for its effect, and encouraging garrulity. To desecration of gravestones as a permissible means of youthful self-expression. And to self-styled poets conversing in sporadically alliterative rhymes and other wordplay that, in fact, is forthcoming only after hours of creative contemplation. Oh, and it helps to be a fan of The Simpsons.
Before the midpoint of Sharma’s self-indulgent ramble (which would have audiences at the Green Mill snapping their fingers in frustration), we suspect that Nicotine and Gravy—that’s what they call themselves, honest—are a double suicide waiting to happen. They aren’t, but so weary do we become of the former’s whining and the latter’s compliance that the discovery that they will not meet a horrific end comes as small relief. Ultimately, the as-yet-undeveloped potential evident in the first two scenarios far outweighs the surplus of empty words pumping up a one-sided symposium in need of severe editing.