DANCING WITH DEATH

posted by James Reel

    In the newest Tucson Weekly, I pass judgment on three more-or-less new plays:

    All three plays that opened locally last week show us women dancing with death: a Jewish teenager interned in Nazi labor camps, three graduates of a Catholic girls' school remembering a classmate who had been murdered years before, a lonely and self-destructive rock star.
    The newest of the three plays is Letters to Sala at Invisible Theatre. … Sala's Gift was fast-tracked to the stage, and Hutton readily admits that the script still needs some work. She's right, but if you think of IT's production as a first public draft, the play shows plenty of potential despite its flaws. …
    Meanwhile, the sometimes cautious Live Theatre Workshop is going out on a limb with an almost-new play by Tucsonan Toni Press-Coffman. In Holy Spirit on Grand Avenue, three successful and privileged women reunite many years after having been best buddies at the Bronx Catholic girls' school of the play's title. Eventually, the conversation turns to a classmate of theirs who was murdered more than 20 years before, when she was just 8 years old.
    That girl, Diana, is a constant presence throughout the play, trying to understand the adult conversation of her former friends, chatting with an apparition of the boy who killed her, and venting her growing bitterness and frustration to the audience. …
    Rock star Janis Joplin didn't quite grow up, either, although she had about 20 years more opportunity than Diana. Joplin is the subject of Love, Janis, the third offering in Arizona Theatre Company's current RepFest. Be assured that this is not just one of those smarmy jukebox musicals lionizing some popular singer of yore; oh, there's plenty of music here, but this is a serious and effective study of a figure who is very sympathetic, despite her outrageousness and personal failings.