A prevailing rule-of-thumb among emcees is to open and close the show with your strongest acts and hide your weakest ones in the middle. The running times of the three one-act plays that comprise Series B of the Heartland Studio One-Act Play Festival render this plan impossible to implement, however, so be warned that most of the good stuff is over by intermission.
Leading off is Leon And Joey, Keith Huff’s off-beat romantic comedy about twin brothers, one of whom considers himself too wicked to live. Before Joey offs himself, however, he must find a caretaker for his slow-witted sibling, Leon. The latter quickly perceives the attraction between his new custodian and his self-styled “evil twin,” but it takes the intervention of a pagan Woodland Deity and a self-schooled witch to put everything to right.
The second play, Allan Knee’s St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, concerns two former lovers who reunite every Feb. 14 to reaffirm their reasons for splitting up. Adrian Casas’ direction enables the mostly-young actors to make the most of their material in both these plays (especially Aaron Torricelli, whose flower-noshing Mo-Billy in Leon And Joey charms us immediately) though Huff’s has panache enough to stand on its own.
Unfortunately, the latter half of the evening is taken up with Mimi’s Famous Company, a nasty little tale of a young lady whose dominating mother has so brainwashed her into thinking herself perfect that she blithely murders anyone who disagrees with that assessment. Playwright Nancy Wright’s telegraphs her teenage serial killer’s homicidal plans well in advance for every scene, even after the arc of the plot becomes wholly predictable. And the repetitiousness of the dialogue bespeaks an angry author more bent on vituperative ax-grinding than insight. In other hands, this might have made for a passable shiver-and-giggle farce, but director Kevin Hanna takes this comic-book satire much too seriously to render it anything but tediously juvenile. The actors do their best to redeem their paper-thin characters, but it will require another, better-written, play to show us what they can do.