City Theatre

Center stage: City Theatre's Summer Shorts moves to Carnival Center for 45-day run

BY CHRISTINE DOLEN
cdolen@MiamiHerald.com

PATRICK FARRELL / MIAMI HERALD STAFF

Actress Irene Adjan, at right, and other actors take on multiple roles in City Theatre's annual Summer Shorts festival.

Tropical South Florida has such subtle seasonal shifts that it falls to events -- the end of school, the start of hurricane season, several annual festivals -- to signal the arrival of summer.

City Theatre's Summer Shorts festival, now in its 12th year, is one of the most popular harbingers of summer for people who dig theater that is both varied and brief, with a little partying thrown in.

As always, the math of this festival gets a little mind-boggling: 15 short plays grouped into two programs, presented by a company of nine actors and seven directors. But this year, with the festival's shift from the under-renovation Ring Theatre at the University of Miami to the Studio Theater at the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts, the stakes are higher than ever.

''This is a huge move for us,'' says Stephanie Norman, City Theatre's producing artistic director and one of its three founders. ``We're going to be here for 45 days. We're using a new configuration [with the audience surrounding the stage] for the space. We're going to have grills out by Biscayne Boulevard on Thursday and Friday, and a tapas menu on Saturday and Sunday. Being at South Florida's premier venue feels right. But it really is a leap.''

What makes the move especially challenging is money. Because the cash-strapped Carnival Center is a union facility, Norman says, ``the meter is running every minute . . . The festival is costing $400,000; it was $100,000 less at the Ring. We've had to do more fundraising.''

Marco Ramirez, the young Miami playwright who generated a big buzz at this year's Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, is playing a dual role in Summer Shorts 2007. The 24-year-old New York University grad is City Theatre's literary manager, which means he participates in the company's ongoing short-play partnership with Actors Theatre of Louisville, as well as helping to sort through 1,200 scripts to settle on the 15 chosen for this year's Summer Shorts festival.

Ramirez also is one of the playwrights whose work is featured in both Summer Shorts and City Theatre's concurrent Shorts for Kids! festival. I Am Not Batman, the piece that won Ramirez the $1,000 Heideman Award at the Humana Festival in April, is getting a kinetic new mounting in Miami. Stuart Meltzer directs Bechir Sylvain as a kid who escapes the harshness of his life by imagining himself the comic book superhero, as Erik Fabregat adds texture and mood on drums.

For the family-friendly kids' shorts lineup, Ramirez wrote Regina Spector Wins the Science Fair. But as he often does, he went out of his way to make sure his play wasn't chosen just because he works for City Theatre.

''I submitted it under a pen name, Ray Menendez. And I used my grandma's address,'' Ramirez says with a grin. ``It's easier for people reading the scripts to be frank if they don't know it's me.''
That serious artistry wed to a playful spirit is a hallmark of Summer Shorts, one of the most collaborative endeavors in South Florida's theater community.

Its directors -- Meltzer, who teaches at New World School of the Arts; Paul Tei, founder and artistic director of Miami's Mad Cat Theatre Company; J. Barry Lewis, who oversees all the work as the festival's artistic coordinator; James Samuel Randolph, another New World teacher; Margaret Ledford, who stages the shows at Broward's Promethean Theatre; and producer Norman -- come from all over the region.

Its celebrated acting company includes Carbonell Award-winners Elizabeth Dimon, Irene Adjan and Antonio Amadeo (he is also a founder of The Naked Stage); Sylvain and Kameshia Duncan, both with Miami's young Ground Up & Rising; Ceci Fernandez, another young actress; and veteran actors Fabregat, Tom Wahl and Steve Trovillion, aka ''Mr. Summer Shorts,'' by virtue of having worked in 10 of the 12 festivals.

There is, says artistic coordinator Lewis, 'no formula in choosing the plays. We say, `What is the writing that bubbles to the surface?' The topics depend on what's going on in society.''

This year's playbill includes drama and comedy, with pieces from festival favorites like Rolin Jones (Ron Bobby Had Too Big a Heart) and Joshua James (Ambivalent), one by City co-founder Susan Westfall (Uprising), a telenovela parody (¿Donde está Pedro Mano? by Montserrat Mendez) and the crazy Splat!, in which South Florida playwright Michael McKeever imagines how miffed Munchkins might react to Dorothy messing up Oz.

To a man and woman, the Summer Shorts company is juiced about the festival's evolution and the fact that theirs is the first local theater company to have a long sit-down run at the Studio Theater.

''The acoustics are great,'' says Duncan. ``You don't have to work as hard vocally, but physically, you have to work extra hard. There are no cheap seats. That's the challenge.''

For Adjan, Shorts means ``going back to all your skills as an actor. You have a very short time to establish character and tell a story. It's the same challenge the playwrights have.''

Tei savors what he can learn from -- and how he can try to top -- the other directors. Meltzer is also absorbing working ideas, and says being at the Carnival Center is like ``. . . putting on a great new pair of shoes with your summer shorts.''

For Trovillion, the in-the-round configuration creates ``a dream-like setting, into which we're going to drop people and ideas, magic, exquisite images that come and go away.''

Even so, the idea of doing so many plays in such a short time makes him feel like it always does.
``It's a workout. It scares me every year.''

Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.