Editor’s Note: It’s always a great pleasure to have Peter Golub grace the pages of the Selective Echo blog. The young gifted writer and literary scholar from Salt Lake City recently reviewed the first of three readings highlighting new original plays by local playwrights as part of an ongoing collaboration between Plan-B Theatre and Meat and Potato Theatre. The theatrical laboratory project is led by Tobin Atkinson. The other readings are scheduled for April 14 and June 2 at 7 p.m. in the Studio Theatre of the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts. Tickets are free but must be reserved in advance and they go quickly, a testament to the substantial bounty of original writing talent in the Utah arts community. For more information, see here.

On March 10, the Plan-B Theatre Company and Meat and Potato Theatre, in a theatre laboratory project led by Tobin Atkinson, showcased two 25-minute plays, Self-Storage, written by Elaine Jarvik, and Stumped, written by Debora Threedy. The performances were part of the company’s Script-in-Hand Series, which is a kind of trial run for new work by up-and-coming and established playwrights. The venue was relaxed and informal, set in the small Studio Theatre at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center. First, the scripts were read by well rehearsed actors, and then the audience participated in a discussion about the work. All seats were full and the audience responded with enthusiasm to both performances.

In 2008, Elaine Jarvik participated in the Humana Festival of New American Plays, with the 10-minute play “Dead Right”, in which a husband and wife discuss their obituaries at the dinner table. “Dead Right” is a comedy in the Lawrence Stern vein. As Stern’s Tristram Shandy keeps running up against the problem “I am not yet born,” the couple in “Dead Right” contemplates their obituary even though “they are not yet dead.”

“Self-Storage” is also a comedy that works with the problem of planning for the future, and trying to reconstruct the past. The play takes place in a storage facility, and the dialogue is between two people, a man—Tick (Josh Thoemke)—and a woman—Rosie (Stephanie Howell). Tick is a doomsday scenario fanatic whose wife has kicked him out because of his obsessions about the end of the world. Tick uses his unit to store his end-of-the-world paraphernalia, which includes the book “Every Dismal Thing,” a loud speaker, and a tinfoil thermal suit designed to keep a person warm in the event a catastrophe occurs in winter and there is no heat. Rosie is a normal suburban housewife who is guarded, but is also ready to listen to Tick’s paranoid ramblings. She uses her unit to reconstruct the bedroom of her young son who was killed in a car accident. With humor and poignancy Jarvik juxtaposes Rosie’s real sadness caused by a quotidian event that occurred in the past against Tick’s hyperbolic fantasy projected into the future. Under the direction of Alexandra Harbold the play comes to life, with enjoyable performances from both Howell and Thoemke.

Thoemke does a good job of capturing Tick’s anxiety, caused by an obsession with saving the world through preparedness at the expense of alienating his wife and children, while Howell captures the tension inside Rosie’s mind. She always seems to be on the brink of abandoning Tick as he talks. Her normal reaction to a person like Tick would be to nervously smile and leave as soon as possible, but she doesn’t. She listens and from time to time finishes his sentences with humorous comments. When Tick names off the many possible disasters awaiting humankind, “nuclear war, EMPs, terrorism, bio-terrorism, chemical warfare, near Earth objects, rogue states, dirty bombs…” Rosie chimes in, “Locusts!” She even dons one of his tinfoil thermal suits upon his insistence. Her reciprocity leads Tick to believe that she, too, is concerned about the end of the world, and, in her acceptance of his “help,” she helps him feel less lonely in his hallucination.

But she also tries to bring him closer to reality. When Tick talks about being ready for an earthquake, she asks him if he is ready for a 9.0 earthquake, which makes him admit he is not. “When does it stop?” she asks almost pleadingly. Of course, she is not only asking Tick this question, but herself as well. Her shrine to her dead son is a secret that she keeps from her husband who believes it is time to move on.

“Stumped” is written by the more established playwright Debora Threedy, who is one of the two playwrights of Plan-B’s current production of “Wallace,” about authors Wallace Stegner and Wallace Thurman and which premiered at the Rose Wagner this month to favorable reviews. Like “Self-Storage,” Threedy’s play works with the themes of past trauma and the desire to do good in the future.

However, “Stumped” is the more cerebral of the two. (Threedy holds a professorship at the S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah.) And emotionally, Threedy is more in the company of playwrights such as Lisa Loomer, Paula Vogel, and Caryl Churchill.

There are times when “Stumped” (deftly directed by Mark Fossen) produces that gut-wrenching feeling caused by the injustice inflicted by men of authority on the disempowered, in this case a young woman who has had a tubal ligation against her will.

The play consists of two dramatic spaces, one real and one imagined. In the real, a law student, Debora (Colleen Lewis), studies a Supreme Court case for her class. The imagined is Debora’s thought experiment about what would happen if the plaintiff, Linda (Deena Marie Manzanares), met with the defendant, the judge (Josh Thoemke), who issued the court order for Linda’s tubal ligation.

Threedy does a fine job of setting the dry judicial language of the case as it is in the book against the emotional desperate language of the women the case involves. Debora herself narrates the case as events unfold in her imagination. Linda demands answers from her mother (Stephanie Howell) and the judge. When she enters the judge’s office she calls herself “karma.” Debora wants the case to make sense, because she herself is studying to be a lawyer. As she says, “unfairness has always pushed my buttons.” She wants to believe that justice is fair despite evidence to the contrary.

In a way, “Stumped” and “Self-Storage” mirror one another. In “Self-Storage,” the probability of an apocalyptic catastrophe (future) is juxtaposed with the reality of a personal human catastrophe (past). In “Stumped,” a legal case from a law book (past) is juxtaposed with a young woman’s desire to do good in a system that seems unfair (future). Both work with two dramatic spaces which are in dialogue with one another, and, in both instances, one space is full of facts, statistics, and a desire to change the future and the other is full of loneliness, longing, and a desire to change the past.

As an audience we can appreciate both of these states. All of us have thought about putting on some sort of aegis, be it a lawyer’s suit or tinfoil thermal underwear, in order to not only make the world better for ourselves, but for our fellow human beings as well. Indeed, this theatrical laboratory is testing and finding compelling significant evidence of Anthony Neilson’s proposition that the playwright, unique among the community of writers, effectively masters an immediately valid and relevant forum “that truly captures the impression of our fragile and transient lives.” For example, these two readings reverberate in their contemporary connections to recent events. The volume of donations contributed to tsunami and earthquake relief is a testament to our desire to help others, but somehow it is never enough. No matter how much we all donated to Haiti none of us could have prevented the earthquake in Chile. As storytellers, these playwrights remind us just how ephemeral our sense of order and stability actually is.