By George Hatza
Freelance Arts Writer
It has been one of the premier highlights of the winter theater season for more than a decade.
Reading Theater Project’s 10th annual “5-Minute Fringe Festival: Inspired by True Events” will open Thursday, Feb. 27, and run through Sunday, March 2. Performances on Feb. 27, 28 and March 1 are scheduled for 7:30 p.m., and the March 2 performance will begin at 2 p.m.
The event will be held in the black-box Schumo Theater at the Yocum Institute for Arts Education, 3000 Penn Ave., West Lawn, Pa., 19609. As in the past, tickets are Pay What You Will, including free admission, with a recommended cost of $20 and a $40 Pay It Forward option for those who would like to donate to the company and its Pay What You Will alternative.
According to RTP artistic director Vicki Haller Graff, who is the director of this year’s festival, the theme of the presentation, consisting of new work by 14 playwrights and performing artists, was drawn from the season’s overall theatrical leitmotif: “Illuminate.”
The first play of the current season, which traditionally begins each fall, was D.W. Gregory’s “Intimate Exposures,” based on a true story that took place during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Reading.
“That play was absolutely inspired by true events,” Graff said. “We decided to take our curiosity about true events and extend it to our creative community for the Fringe. And thus, it remains true to the overall theme of ‘Illuminate.’”
RTP strives to maintain a five-minute limit on each performance piece, although some do go slightly beyond that. Variety is the name of the game, with this year’s lineup featuring monologues (some personal narratives and some storytelling), rap/Hip Hop pieces, short scenes (one using puppets), music and dance.
As the festival’s director, Graff, along with stage manager Sean Sassaman, explained how the team plans to create an appropriate style and order for the evening: “We work to provide the production with a flow and to assure that all the pieces have a similar level of quality. Our job is to help each one reach its full potential.”
To offer examples of the kinds of work with which the artists are engaged for this year’s festival, Graff briefly discussed a short play by playwright Adam Richter and a monologue from an upcoming work by fledgling writer Misha R’Kingsley.
“Richter began with an outline of a person writing his own family history, Graff said. “He found four actors with improv experience, people who know how to build on a prompt. His focus was process-oriented. For him, as an artist/playwright, the goal was to create a new work in this manner.”
The monologue that R’Kingsley has written and directed is, Graff said, “a personal and entertaining account of dealing with a chronic disease. It’s a piece of a larger one-woman show she’s developing. I love that she’s using the Fringe as a place to create her work.”
Both Richter and R’Kingsley wanted to talk about their individual works in more detail.
Richter, who resides in Wyomissing, works by day as a newsroom analyst for Media News Group. Since 2018, he has written more than 100 plays, two of them full-length. He serves as the literary manager for RTP, and he is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America and the Online News Association.
A graduate of Reading High School, he attended the University of Pittsburgh earning a B.A. in philosophy. In 2011, he joined the staff of the Reading Eagle newspaper where he worked primarily as the digital editor. He has participated in eight of the 10 RTP Fringe festivals.
The play, entitled “Made-Up Stories About My Ancestors,” began essentially as an outline with one named role and four others identified only by numbers. The four-page piece soon grew to 12 with the help of his cast of four performers: Eric Goldsmith, Megan Rose, Rob Weidman and Kathleen Harris Brantman.
Beginning last December, the cast signed onto the project after listening to Richter’s ideas and reading the outline. Upon receiving RTP’s approval, the five began brainstorming, using improvisation as the technique of writing the piece.
“We just kept working on it until it felt like a script,” Richter said. “Did the beats feel right? It was immensely collaborative, which made it a lot of fun. … The five of us did all the acting, writing, directing and even the costumes.”
So, other than injecting the work with spontaneity and diversity, why develop a play using this process? Isn’t it gone after a single performance? Richter didn’t hesitate to answer.
“I wrote an improv play before,” he said. “It was called ‘Pandemic Bus Stop.’ The actors came up with their own stories. When it was performed, it was different every night. I gave the general guidelines. Except at the end, I had no final product. No physical script. But this time, when we agreed that a scene had achieved its best version, we preserved it.”
Richter added, the play captures “… the fantastical tales we humans spin to show that we came from greatness.”
RTP’s 10th annual 5-Minute Fringe Festival is the first one for thespian, social worker and first-time playwright Misha R’Kingsley. The Lancaster native, who now resides in West Lawn, earned a B.A. in theater arts with a minor in psychology from East Stroudsburg University. After graduating in 1990, she traveled south to Washington, D.C., instead of north to New York City, to pursue her dreams of a career in theater performance.
She was thrilled to audition for the Living Stage Theatre Company, founded in 1966 (it closed in 2002) as an outreach professional theater troupe of the acclaimed Arena Stage. She was even more excited when she was accepted.
“It was an all-improvisational theater,” she said. There was singing, poetry, improv skits – all of that blended with colorful cubes and ladders. It was such a joy.”
However, during performance R’Kingsley ripped four muscles in her knee, and instead of resting, continued her work. The result was that she ended up, in her words, “blowing out my knee.”
“That ended my acting career,” she said. “I moved on to teaching and directing, using a lot of Living Stage techniques. And in 2005, I earned a master’s degree in social work from the University of Maryland.”
In 1993, she discovered that she had a rare condition called congenital myasthenic syndrome, with which she has been dealing to this day.
“The nerves and muscles don’t communicate very well,” she explained. “It affects the eyes, your smile, your voice, swallowing, the use of your arms, fingers, legs, and worst of all your breathing. The treatment is not successful. In fact, my monologue addresses how the medical establishment is set up to fail with this disease.”
With acting, directing and teaching no longer options, R’Kinglsey decided to try something new.
“This is my first foray into playwriting,” she said, almost gleefully. “It’s the first thing in theater I haven’t done. And the monologue, which is part of a more extensive, full-length show, will be performed by an actress, Alexis Leon, playing me. I think she will be fabulous.”
R’Kingsley has been declared legally disabled. She suffers from bouts of depression. Nevertheless, she titled the piece “Finding the Light.”
“No matter how dark things get, there will always be light to find,” she said. “Light and dark constantly co-exist. I refuse to allow disease or politics to take away my spirit. So, I’m hoping the monologue will make people think. I’m breaking down the fourth wall a lot because I want the audience to feel uncomfortable sometimes, and then other times warm and fuzzy.
“For that reason, I added tons of humor. Physical humor and snarky one-liners and sarcasm. I want people to feel it, absorb it, but not walk away in a cloud of bleakness. I want them to walk away with hope.”
For more information on the 10th annual 5-Minute Fringe Festival: Inspired by True Events” and to secure tickets, visit the website at readingtheaterproject.org or call 484-706-9719.
George Hatza is the former Entertainment Editor of the Reading Eagle. He is retired and living in Exeter Township.
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