By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
The Black Swamp Players haven’t quite wrapped up their 2023-2024 season yet. Their last play “Jennifer’s Birth” by Rich Orloff opens next Friday, with shows July 12-14 and July 19-21. The play is this year’s winner of the troupe’s Telling Stories competition.
And over Labor Day Weekend, the cast of last November’s “Puffs, or Seven Increasingly Eventful Years at a Certain School of Magic and Magic” will travel to Newark to compete in the state Ohio Community Theatre Association’s state conference.
[RELATED: Players’ ‘Puffs’ works its magic at regional conference, earning trip to state competition]
Still, the groundwork is laid for next season.
Heath Diehl, who is returning as president, said coming up with this year’s season was “oddly easy.”
The play selection committee, he said, is one of the Players’ biggest committees. “This is what people want to do. They want a say in the plays we produce and the stories we tell.”
This year those stories will be:
“Perfect Arrangement” by Topher Payne. Sept. 27-29 & Oct. 4-6.
“Be Here Now” by Deborah Zoe Laufer, Dec. 6-8 & Dec. 13-15.
“For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday” by Sarah Ruhl, Feb 21-23 & Feb. 28-March 2.
“The Language Archive” by Julia Cho, April25-27, May 2-4.
“Murdering Medea” by Aly Kantor, June 20-22 & June 27-29. This is the Telling Stories winner.
Not part of the season will be “Murder at a Pie Auction,” March 14-16, fundraiser for the troupe. “It’s this ridiculous murder mystery that has a pie auction in the middle,” Diehl explained.
These were selected from about 50 scripts read by the entire committee. He and Sarah Chambers, both faculty members at BGSU, read even more scripts as part of their jobs. He teaches in the Department of English and the Honors College, and she in the Department of Theatre and Film.
“Our image is we’re doing community theater, often with some social justice bent to the themes and subject,” Diehl said. “That’s what we look for and just really good theater.”
The opening “Perfect Arrangement” is set in McCarthy Era, in the 1950s. “It’s a comedy, but a dark comedy,” Diehl said. It really has a resonance for queer, LBGTQ+ and a lot of groups that are being targeted.”
Next up is another dark comedy, “Be Here Now” about a woman who has a brain tumor. One symptom of the tumor is that this person with a negative outlook on life, now experiences joy. Does she have life-saving surgery that will save her life? Or does she keep the tumor and have joy in her shortened life?
“For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday” opens with siblings gathered after their father’s death. Their impromptu wake evolves into a trip to Neverland.
“It’s about growing older and dealing with aging and mortality, but also not getting old staying young in the way you look at your life and who you are.”
“The Language Archive” is a play about love, language, and loss. The play was staged at BGSU in 2018 with Chambers directing.
One technical issue, the director Fran Martone is already pondering is how to fill the theater with the smell of baking bread.
[RELATED: “The Language Archive” speaks to difficulties of communicating from the heart]
The season’s final play “Murdering Medea” is the winner of the Telling Stories competition.
While the three plays chosen as previous winners have been good scripts, Diehl said, this is the first one that really matches my vision for Telling Stories. “Murdering Medea” is a play that addresses social justice issues in “communities like ours.”
The play deals with the aftermath of the overturning of Roe V. Wade using the classical tragedy of Medea. “It’s a really brilliant script.”
This will be the play’s first production, which is a condition of the competition. The playwright will have a couple developmental workshops of the work before being staged in Bowling Green.
All these productions fit with the realities of presenting theater in the theater on Oak Street venue which the Players opened in 2021.
`“We’re looking for plays that have smaller casts,” Diehl said. Ten or more is about the limit given the size of the venue.
“We don’t want plays that require a lot of scenic lighting and sound demands.”
That means musicals are likely a thing of the past, Diehl said. So many other nearby companies — Perrysburg Musical Theatre, 3B Productions, Waterville Playshop — “do musicals so well.”
Most importantly, “we want plays that people aren’t doing,” he said. “If we have this script that’s popular, we have this unwritten rule that it has not to have been done by an area theater for five years.”
This approach has attracted audiences and talent from throughout the region. That includes directors as well as actors.
In addition to Martone, who helmed “The Moors” last season, directing “The Language Archive,” other directors are: Barbara Barkin, “Perfect Arrangement”; Nancy Wright, “Be Here Now”; and Dillon Sickels, “For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday.”
The community theaters in the region are a community within themselves. They support each other, including by sharing news of casting calls and productions.
“We don’t stay alive by being insular,” Diehl said. There is a group of “tried and true Black Swampers” who attend every show,” he said. “We love them, but we love new people, too. … Every show we see a new group of people. … That’s how we carry on.”
He recalled a conversation with one regular. She told him that she enjoyed everything in the 2023-2024 season, particularly “Life Sucks,” the contemporary take on Chekov’s “Uncle Vanya.”
She did not like so much “the postmodern Ibsen,” she told Diehl. That play, “Nora,” happened to be the one Diehl had directed.
He’s fine with that. “I love to hear that there are things that resonate with people and there are things that don’t,” he said. “We want to tell stories that everyone can connect with. That’s what I think we’re doing. That’s what I hope we’re doing.”
