Black Swamp players ready to tell new season full of stories – BG Independent News

By DAVID DUPONT

BG Independent News

The Black Swamp Players aren’t quite done with their 2023-24 season yet. Their latest play, “Jennifer’s Birth,” by Rich Orloff, opens next Friday, with performances 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 Wizardry” will travel to Newark to participate in the Ohio Community Theatre Association’s state conference.

(RELATED: Players’ ‘Puffs’ work magic at regional conference, earn trip to state meet)

However, the foundations are laid for next season.

Heath Diehl, who returns as president, said putting together this year’s season has been “strangely easy.”

The play selection committee, he said, is one of the Players’ most important committees. “It’s what people want to do. They want to have a say in the plays we produce and the stories we tell.”

This year, these stories will be:

“Perfect Arrangement” by Topher Payne. September 27-29 and October 4-6.

“Be Here Now” by Deborah Zoe Laufer, December 6-8 and December 13-15.

“For Peter Pan on his 70th Birthday” by Sarah Ruhl, February 21-23 and February 28-March 2.

“The Language Archive” by Julia Cho, April 25-27, May 2-4.

“Murdering Medea” by Aly Kantor, June 20-22 and June 27-29. This is the winner of Telling Stories.

The show “Murder at a Pie Auction,” which runs March 14-16 and is intended to raise money for the troupe, will not be part of the season. “It’s a ridiculous mystery that takes place in the middle of a pie auction,” Diehl said.

These scripts were selected from about 50 screenplays read by the entire committee. He and Sarah Chambers, both BGSU faculty members, read even more scripts as part of their work. He teaches in the English Department and the Honors College, and she teaches in the Theatre and Film Department.

“We present ourselves as community plays, often with some social justice dimension in the themes and topics,” Diehl said. “That’s what we’re looking for and really good theater.”

The first single, “Perfect Arrangement,” is set in the McCarthy era of the 1950s. “It’s a comedy, but a dark comedy,” Diehl said. “It really resonates with queer, LGBTQ+ and a lot of other groups that are targeted.”

Then, another dark comedy, “Be Here Now,” tells the story of a woman with a brain tumor. One of the symptoms of the tumor is that this person, who had a negative outlook on life, now experiences joy. Will she undergo surgery that will save her life? Or will she keep the tumor and enjoy her shortened life?

“For Peter Pan on His 70th Birthday” opens with a reunion between siblings after their father’s death. Their impromptu wake turns into a trip to Neverland.

“It’s about getting older and dealing with aging and mortality, but also not getting older by staying young in how you look at your life and who you are.”

“The Language Archive” is a play about love, language, and loss. The play was directed at BGSU in 2018 by Chambers.

One technical question that director Fran Martone is already thinking about is how to fill the room with the smell of baking bread.

(RELATED: “The Language Archive” is about the difficulties of communicating with the heart)

The season finale, “Murdering Medea,” wins the Telling Stories competition.

While all three of the previous winners were good scripts, Diehl said, this is the first one that really fits 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 Roe V. Wade decision, drawing on the classic tragedy Medea. “It’s a really brilliant script.”

This will be the first production of the play, which is a requirement of the competition. The playwright will participate in several workshops to develop the work before its production in Bowling Green.

All of these productions correspond to the realities of presenting theatre in the Oak Street theatre that the Players opened in 2021.

“We’re looking for rooms with smaller numbers of participants,” Diehl said. Ten or more is about the limit given the size of the room.

“We don’t want pieces that require a lot of stage lighting and sound.”

That means musicals are probably a thing of the past, Diehl said. So many other companies in the area — Perrysburg Musical Theatre, 3B Productions, Waterville Playshop — “are doing musicals really well.”

But most importantly, “we want plays that people aren’t doing,” he said. “If we have a text that’s popular, we have this unwritten rule that it can’t have been performed by a local theater in the last five years.”

This approach attracted audiences and talent from across the region, including directors and actors.

In addition to Martone, who directed “The Moors” last season, directing “The Language Archive,” the other directors are: Barbara Barkin, “Perfect Arrangement”; Nancy Wright, “Be Here Now”; and Dillon Sickels, “For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday.”

The area’s community theatres are a community in their own right. They support each other, including sharing news of castings and productions.

“We don’t stay alive by being insular,” Diehl said. “There’s a group of proven ‘Black Swampers’ who come to every show,” he said. “We love them, but we also love new people. … Every show, we meet a new group of people. … That’s how we keep going.”

He recalls a conversation with a regular. She told him she enjoyed everything about the 2023-24 season, especially “Life Sucks,” the contemporary version of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.”

She didn’t like “postmodern Ibsen” very much, she confided to Diehl. This play, “Nora,” was precisely the one that Diehl had directed.

That doesn’t bother him. “I like to hear that some things resonate with people and some things don’t,” he said. “We want to tell stories that everyone can relate to. That’s what we do, I think. That’s what I hope we do.”