An Outstanding Vintage

Have I mentioned that my friends are, seriously, incredibly talented? I have written before about my friend Jeremy. He's an actor who currently pays his bills by recording the narration for commercials - you can hear him pushing products like Keurig coffee makers, Trojan condoms, Beyblades toy tops, DSW shoes, and Comcast cable (if you subscribe to Comcast in Vermont).

In this commercial, Jeremy gets extreme, providing the voice of a 14-year-old in a skate park who plays with a spinning, fighting top which has nothing to do with skateboarding and is not favored by anyone over the age of 8.

On the side, however, Jeremy is one hell of a script writer. I wrote about a reading of his film script that I attended about two years ago. Jeremy is very sarcastic and self-deprecating, and to hear him tell it he's not much good at all. So it came as quite a surprise to me that his dialogue is often razor sharp and his plot lines form a believable layer atop a depth of symbolism and meaning. He studied theater and has worked in it for years. He knows his stuff.  I was pleased, therefore, to hear that he had arranged a staging of his one-act play, "An Outstanding Vintage." Alas, apparently I was not pleased enough to get the time right, and I showed up at the theater half an hour after the curtain went up (which, as this was a one-act, meant I missed the whole thing). Happily for Jeremy and for me, however, his script was selected to be part of Paul Michael's One Act Festival this year (called, pretentiously, The Network), so I got to see it on Saturday.

My friend Michael met me at the theater, where we ponied up $18 each and were allowed inside a small, stark theater. We sat on cushioned folding chairs and watched four one-acts, each of which lasted about 20 minutes. Jeremy's play was up first. It takes place in the dressing room of a budding Broadway starlet who has just finished the first week of her first major show. Jeremy plays her ex-boyfriend who surprises her by coming to see the show and visiting her afterwards, and over wine they relive both the high points and the demise of their relationship. It was both witty and poignant, and I was quite impressed. Watch a preview below:

My second-favorite play was called "Sybil's Last Show." In it,  Sybil, an aging magician's assistant, and her son work through the aftermath of a supposed mistake in which Sybil hands the magician, her husband and the boy's father, a real saw instead of the trick one, and he cuts off his finger. It was hysterical but had some moving moments as well. One of the two other plays was great, and the other was atrocious. Mike and I thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. After the show, Mike and I voted for the two plays we liked best, chatted with Jeremy for a bit, then headed off for a cup of coffee and a bitch session about the one horrendous play we saw.

Jeremy is up against 43 other plays. (Well, 42 really, because the one was so horrible that I don't think it can realistically be viewed as competition.) Odds for him are not great, given the numbers, but being selected for this festival was an honor, and I hope, for everyone's sake, that he'll continue to write and perform scripts for us all to enjoy.