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Running shorts
The fifth annual Boston Theater Marathon
BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

What happens if you’re a pop star facing your demise? If you realize you’re a poet and you have to tell your parents? If, in the days after September 11, you’re having dinner with a sailor stationed in New York? If you find yourself with your arm stuck in a toilet? And what happens if you have only 10 minutes to resolve your difficulty?

Those scenarios and 41 others will be sorted out one at a time at the fifth annual Boston Theater Marathon next Sunday at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. In a succession of lightning bursts of character, conflict, and conversation, 45 New England playwrights, each matched with an area theater company, flex their dramatic muscles. And just as you have only an instant to admire runners’ physiques as they whiz past during that other time-honored tradition, here you can spend hours surveying the many structurally sound units in this rapidly passing dramatic landscape.

Like the other marathon, this event is standing room only. Only difference is, this one tests the viewers’ endurance, not the performers’. A ticket entitles you to come and go all day. There’s often a wait, but doors open every hour, and each play is performed in both of the BPT’s black-box theaters.

So how does a work achieve the optimum storytelling efficiency necessary to qualify?

" If Romeo and Juliet were a 10-minute play, what would you focus on, " asks Kate Snodgrass, BTM founder and the artistic director of BPT. " Probably the death. Or maybe Romeo killing Tybalt. It would be some moment where there’s a change. Usually the plays have a set-up, a change, and then a tiny dénouement. Characters have to be somewhat generic, so the audience identifies with them and knows what’s at stake immediately. It asks, what does a person want and how close are they to getting it? I’m surprised how many scenarios people come up with. "

Aside from morsels by stalwarts Robert Brustein, Ed Bullins, Israel Horovitz, Theresa Rebeck, and Rough & Tumble Theatre Company, from whom Snodgrass solicited work, the nuggets were chosen from a pool of 315 applicants. " The form adds intensity and encourages experiment, because you have to do something so quickly that normal strategies don’t work, " says playwright and BTM co-founder Bill Lattanzi, who teaches at Brandeis.

" It’s a way of honing the craft between writing longer plays, " adds participant Ronan Noone, whose The Lepers of Baile Baiste and The Blowin of Baile Gall were professionally produced over the past year. " In thinking about it, if the adage of 15 minutes of fame is applicable to reality and real people, then the 10-minute play is applicable to one character who has a story to tell. "

The BTM is, however, not the only theater marathon in town. Israel Horovitz’s hot-off-the-presses adaptation of Marathon, Italian playwright Edoardo Erba’s meditation on competition, friendship, and mortality, jogs into the Tremont Theatre starting next Thursday. In this one it’s the two actors who work up a sweat: their characters are training for the New York Marathon, and so they run, mostly in place, throughout the one-hour play. A British translation of Marathon was presented by Stoneham Theatre in January to positive reviews. Now the same fit team of actors, Eric Laurits and Adam Paltrowitz, under Weylin Symes’s direction, pound the boards in Horovitz’s version.

The Boston Theater Marathon runs at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, 949 Commonwealth Avenue, next Sunday, April 13, from noon to 10 p.m. All-day tickets are $25, $30 after April 11, proceeds to benefit the Theatre Community Benevolent Fund. Call (617) 358-7529. Marathon, presented by Stoneham Theatre Company at the Tremont Theatre, 276 Tremont Street in the Theater District, opens next Thursday, April 10, and runs through 21. Tickets are $25, half-price for students; call (781) 279-2200.

Issue Date: April 3 - 10, 2003

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