Truth be told, Elise Forier Edie is a little unsettled by one cast member in Living Doll, the play she’s directing in the Bryan Harnetiaux Playwrights’ Forum Festival, which kicks off this evening in the Spokane Civic Theatre’s Firth J. Chew Studio.
The female cast member goes by Cookie and has been known to give people the creeps when they encounter her unawares. At one point during rehearsals, Edie brought Cookie home and let her sit in the chair behind the desk in her study.
“I just sort of sat her there to rest her,” she says. “Then I walked into my study a few hours later. And I was like, OK, this is not going to work. You can’t be sitting behind my desk.”
Edie briefly contemplated the idea of sequestering Cookie in some out-of-the-way nook at Whitworth University, where she — Edie, that is, not Cookie — chairs the theater department. But then she thought better of it.
“The students would be terrified, and they’d never go down there again.”
So now, until it’s time for Cookie to appear onstage, Edie keeps her locked in a closet and hopes that no unsuspecting soul will open the door.
Written by Seattle-based playwright David Golden, Living Doll is one of the dozen works to be featured at this year’s festival, and it’s indicative of the variety of this year’s slate. Part comedy, part social satire, part horror, Golden’s 10-minute play riffs on the idea of, as Edie asks rhetorically, “What if the murder dolls in movies like Annabelle and Chucky were real?”
Living Doll is a little unusual given that, over the 35 years that the competitive festival has run since its founding in 1983, its winning entries are typically staged in a black-box-style environment with minimal props.
Edie, however, saw Cookie as “a casting problem, not really a props problem” because of how integral she was to Golden’s script.
“I see my primary role as a director in the festival to bring his script to life with his intent and his concerns and his interests,” she says. To that end, she drew on her puppet-related work in children’s theater to bring Cookie to life.
The Turkish playwright Burcu Seyben, who now resides in Twin Falls, Idaho, also has a festival play that might strike some audience members as unnerving. Unlike Living Doll, the events of her Intro to Greek Theater are based on real life.
The episode it portrays happened in the aftermath of Turkey’s fervid Gezi Park protests in 2013. Seyben was in the middle of teaching a class at Istanbul University when suddenly a group of students she didn’t recognize entered the room and sat down.
“They were not my students. They just sat there, and everybody sort of accepted them like they knew something that I wasn’t quite aware of. Then there were these steps outside, and it was complete mayhem, and I could hear it,” she says.
“And I continued teaching because they were gesturing at me with their hands, like, ‘Teach, teach, teach. Start talking and just act normal.’ So I was trying to act normal and teach.”
The commotion outside — was it the police? an angry mob? violent demonstrators? — never burst into her classroom, but the experience prompted Seyben to channel the unanswered questions and intense emotions into her short play, which is directed by Sara Edlin-Marlowe.
For the sake of the festival’s actors and its audience, the 12 one-act plays aren’t presented in a single marathon session. Instead they’re evenly divided into two rotations dubbed A and B, making for a total of three performances of each play over the festival’s four-day run.
Living Doll and Intro to Greek Theater are part of this year’s Rotation A alongside plays like Goodbye Cecile by Molly Allen and Steven Wylie, The Fabulists by Paul Lewis and the World War II-themed Blackout by Lee Lawing. Lawing and Lewis both hail from Bainbridge Island.
Rotation B includes multiple works by local playwrights. Three that were selected by the festival’s anonymous panel are Pam Kingsley’s A. Lee, Abby Burlingame’s comedy Brain by Committee and the Youth Division entry Terminal Turmoil by recent West Valley High School grad Ella McQuaig.
Festival founder Bryan Harnetiaux, now in his 43rd year as the Civic’s playwright in residence, also has a noncompetitive entry in Rotation B titled The Note. Jerry Sciarrio directs that tale of two characters’ chance encounter at a park and the mysterious note at their feet.
For each play, regardless of writer or rotation, audience members will have the opportunity to weigh in on what they’ve seen and, in some cases, offer feedback directly to the playwright. That workshopping component, says Harnetiaux, is a key part of the festival.
“You know, the average audience member doesn’t think they have anything to contribute in terms of how to better a play, but that’s simply not true. We try to give the audience permission to say anything that comes to mind, whether they were bored or enraptured or irritated or insulted,” he says.
And it’s possible that audience members might have more visceral reactions than usual. Amid the comedies and light dramas, this year’s festival lineup has, as Harnetiaux explains, a fair number of “politically based plays that touch on sensitive issues around personal choices.”
“[Director] Lloyd Richards used to say that if you wanted to know the community’s concerns, look to the playwrights,” Edie says.
Living Doll certainly reflects a concern of hers, albeit one of her own making: How can she permanently part ways with creepy Cookie?
“I’m going to whisper this so she doesn’t hear. I’m looking forward to bringing her down to the theater so she can have a home forever.”
Bryan Harnetiaux Playwrights’ Forum Festival • June 19-22; Thu-Sat at 7:30 pm, Sat-Sun at 2 pm, Sun at 6 pm (two rotations; check website for schedule) • $15 • Firth J. Chew Studio at the Spokane Civic Theatre