Meanwhile Park set for its first double-bill premiere: Andrea Berting’s Red Devil, Nathan Johnson’s Vacation

The splendid Meanwhile Park outdoor theatrical venue will be the site for its first double-bill premiere, featuring one-act plays by Andrea Berting of Chicago (Red Devil) and Nathan Johnson (Vacation). This is the third consecutive summer for a world premiere at Meanwhile Park. 

Both plays were selected by a jury for the Meanwhile Park Playwright Prize from among more than 170 submissions. Berting’s dramedy is set in a hospital chemotherapy infusion lab, featuring three breast cancer patients, including two women characters in their seventies and a third in her twenties. Johnson’s comedy is about two husbands on vacation at a cottage in The Berkshires who realize that each other has concocted a plot to murder each other. Meanwhile Park is a theatrical project produced by Jeff Paris, who has created a professional theatrical space to produce top-quality works in the backyard of his Salt Lake City home.

This year’s double bill featuring the works of playwrights from two of the nation’s largest creative markets confirms how Meanwhile Park has established itself as a well-respected proscenium-less theatrical production venue. “Presenting new plays at Meanwhile Park has been first and foremost fun.” Paris said. “I think that’s the thing that has been most rewarding; that bringing diverse groups of playwrights, actors, creative talent, and audiences creates happiness. It’s a reminder that few things are more human that live storytelling.” 

Paris added, “I love that many of our audience members don’t attend theater productions regularly. Our goal at Meanwhile Park has been to create an environment where theater, even when it involves contemporary, unknown plays, is completely approachable. Every time an audience member is moved emotionally, whether to laugh or to shed a tear, it’s a testament to the power of the performing arts.  For me personally, that’s exhilarating.”

The production runs July 10-20 and tickets are selling out quickly. Meanwhile Park, which is near the Herman Franks Dog Park, opens at 8:30 p.m. on performance nights, and the shows start as the light fades. Please note that this is a private ticket event and is open to those 21 and older. For more information, see the Meanwhile Park website. 

ANDREA BERTING, RED DEVIL

A chemotherapy infusion center in a hospital might seem like a highly unlikely place for comedic potential, save perhaps for gallows humor, but Andrea Berting smartly rises above the creative challenge in Red Devil, featuring three women, two of them at least triple the age of the third breast cancer patient. In her twenties, Emmie is a savvy influencer who knows her way around social media. She seems to immediately hit it off with Val, who is about to turn 70 and has managed to keep the chill, go-with-the-flow vibe of the flower child generation. Rose, a spunky Baby Boomer who also is a widowed butch lesbian, is easily annoyed by Emmie’s über-enthusiastic gusto. Despite differences in their personalities, Rose and Val get along very well, even when Val flawlessly assists Rose in solving crossword puzzles.

Berting does not play down the dramatic gravity of the setting and, in a compact one-act frame, the comedy deftly reveals important details about the personalities and emotions of all three women. More significantly, Berting has endured the same experiences, albeit at a few years older than Emmie faces in the play.  

In an interview with The Utah Review, Berting said she went through the “whole shebang” seven years ago when she was diagnosed with stage 2-B breast cancer. With experience as a screenwriter and in theater working in the wardrobe department, she took up writing theatrical scripts in the wake of the pandemic.

Red Devil is not the first creative result of her experiences with cancer. Her 2022 indie film, Breast in Show, earned Best Original Comedy Feature honors at the Richmond International Film Festival and she was named a Fast Track Fellow by the International Screenwriters’ Association. She also is a current finalist for Stowe Story Labs’ The Black List Artist Development fellowship. The film is about a young breast cancer patient who guides the senior-citizen members of her support group to feel good about their bodies again by teaching them burlesque. One of Berting’s most inspirational role models as a screenwriter is Diablo Cody whose screenwriting debut film, Juno (2007), won both the Academy Award and the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay.

Her first foray as a playwright came with a 10-minute script, Little Kasia Meets the God of Death, which was inspired by her great-grandmother’s immigration story. The short play premiered at the Fargo-Moorhead Community Theater’s 10 Minute Play Festival, and was selected to represent the festival on a local television show.

As for Red Devil, it emerged at a new play incubator with Pocket Theatre VR in Chicago, where Berting lives with her husband. Each playwright was paired with a director and the first 30 minutes of the script was presented in a staged reading. The full production at Meanwhile Park, directed by Teresa Sanderson, will be the play’s first.

Berting continues to expand Red Devil into a ninety-minute script. “I already have 65 pages done,” she added. Indeed, Red Devil is a unique blend of the rom-com and dramedy genres, as it explores the possibilities for love when shadows of death are large enough not to be ignored. Likewise, the play touches on the ideals of what makes good support systems for cancer patients. It also examines social media, despite usual and well-justified concerns about platforms as fertile grounds for toxic and exploitative communication, there are influencers who have leveraged their social media skills to establish meaningful connections that encourage, comfort and assure cancer patients and survivors that their experiences do not have to be endured in isolation.   

NATHAN JOHNSON, VACATION

While Vacation centers on two husbands who have embarked on a romantic getaway and come to realize that each has concocted a plot to murder each, playwright Nathan Johnson’s self-described “Queer ‘Spy vs Spy’ Romp” is intended to make audiences laugh out loud. 

In an interview with The Utah Review, Johnson said, “I love quick and witty banter between intelligent people.” He added that watching films of the thriller genre, he always has been drawn to dark and twisted stories. In some respects, Vacation is a good 21st century example of what Alfred Hitchcock might have made, with Johnson’s story in his two-hander. Set in the kitchen of a rented cottage in The Berkshires, the story features Barrett, a fifty-something elitist snob who comes from old family money, and his husband, James, who is in his late forties. James came from a different socioeconomic life but he also has unashamedly adopted all of the sensibilities of a rich lifestyle, or as Johnson describes in his script, “overly fashionable, as if he lives his life in a ring light.”

Based in New York City and as an alumnus of Columbia University’s master of fine arts degree program, Johnson is a versatile queer artist who has worked as an actor in theater, film and television, as well as a makeup artist for numerous celebrities and has taken to writing both as a magazine contributor and as a playwright. Among his friends and role models is the legendary queer artist icon Charles Busch, who has enjoyed considerable success on and off Broadway. Busch’s work has succeeded for how well it pays homage to classic genres, especially with stories of melodrama with comedic twists that are still as timeless now in the contemporary era as when they were set in the middle of the 20th century. Johnson also enjoys the devilish and absurd twists in the works of Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco.

Johnson said that he is confident that the Meanwhile Park production of Vacation, which will be directed by Jason Bowcutt, will let the coy, razor-sharp, quick-paced rhythm of this two-man battle of wits will prevail over the temptation to accentuate the dark melodramatic circumstances of the couple’s mutually disgruntled relationship. He recalled that actors in one early workshop reading of the script overplayed the melodrama which obscured the full bite of the comedic duel he had penned. 

Vacation was born from a challenge when Johnson, who is a naturally witty person, was dared by a friend to prove that he couldn’t write comedy. The story exists in various forms, first as a 10-minute version and then the scene highlighted in Vacation which became a standalone in the 30-minute version. The two characters as well as a third one (Tristan, who is Barrett’s office assistant) exist in the work-in-progress The Dummies Guide to Murdering Your Husband.  As he explained in an interview published elsewhere, “Interestingly, until Dummies Guide, all of my plays were dramas/thrillers and my friends kept asking why I wasn’t writing comedies. I told them I didn’t write comedy because I wasn’t funny. I wrote this to shut them up.”

A good example of what Johnson hopes for in rendering the full comedic punch is the six-part British comedy series, Vicious, which came out in the middle of the 2010s. Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi played a couple who have lived in the same London apartment for 49 years and while British critics despised the show, American viewers took to it immediately when it aired on PBS outlets. And, as many queer community members know well from their own experiences, who doesn’t love an evening with friends and couples where forked-tongue jibes and heaping servings of shade fly across the room frequently but who still realize that amidst all of the put-downs there are still strong enough undercurrents of love and friendship that keep relationships going, even with the occasional acerbic battle of wits.