Reviewed by Martin Denton

Metropolitan Playhouse kicks off their East Village Theatre Festival with the sixth annual edition of East Village Chronicles, a program of original short plays about Metropolitan's Alphabet City/Lower East Side neighborhood. I caught Evening A (watch for a review of Evening B, coming soon!), which is a program of four pieces, each about 20 minutes long, each in its way a sentimental valentine to the welcoming and nurturing spirit of New York City in general and the ever-changing and ever-accomodating East Village in particular.

The night kicks off with Pam Dickler's Promising, which takes place on a New Jersey Transit train heading to Manhattan's Penn Station. (Laurence Cantor, in an unbilled offstage cameo, plays the NJT conductor with convincing panache, calling out the stops—"Secaucus! Secaucus next!") Crowded near each other on this particular train car are four somewhat disparate souls. Sera is the one we notice first, as she shouts several decibels too loudly into her cellphone to assorted friends and acquaintances. Her neighbor, a quiet, well-dressed man whose name, we will learn, is Ben, is visibly annoyed by her antics...and he's palpably surprised when, after disconnecting from a call, she turns to him and picks up a conversation with him that he didn't even know they'd started. Eventually another passenger, Xavier, joins in: Sera and Xavier are selling Ben, who is from Pittsburgh, on the joys of their neighborhood, the Lower East Side. It turns out, though, that Ben knows more about the area than they imagine, and the tone of the play turns sweetly somber as his story is divulged. Dickler adds an interesting twist near the end of her play about the ways that buildings and landmarks morph and survive in a city as rooted in both history and change as New York is—I would have liked more exploration of that intriguing theme. Elka Rodriguez dominates Promising as the gregarious and rambunctious Sera, with Scott Casper (Ben), Alejandro Rodriguez (Xavier), and Sarah Hankins (Angie, Xavier's "girlfriend") lending support.

Getting By: The First Five Days, by George Holets, comes next. It's about Luka, a man who has returned to NYC after about 30 years of a more-or-less conventional existence upstate in order to pursue his dream of becoming a playwright. The piece unfolds in a Starbucks; in five scenes (over five days) we see Luka acclimate to his new neighborhood and, more significantly, the new neighborhood acclimate to him. Neither Inez, the self-described wannabe actress from Miami, nor the snooty Starbucks Barrista can ultimately resist Luka, whose view of his once and future hometown is downright Sinatra-esque. Alfred Gingold anchors the play as Luka; Elka Rodriguez is delightful as Inez and Ethan Sher is spot-on as the Barrista; and Jacqueline van Biene and Sarah Hankins take smaller (though memorable) roles.

The East Fourth Street Years follows. Written by Morna Murphy Martell, this is the most emotionally complete work on the bill. Told in flashback vignettes, it recounts a youthful fling in which Howie, a 19-year-old Jewish boy from Baltimore, and Mary, a 21-year-old "older woman" from California, fall in love with each other and with their grungy East Village block in 1959. Both aspire to be Broadway stars, but they make do opening a cafe/performance spot that they eventually call "Hubert Alley," accidentally helping to birth off-off-Broadway in the process. (I wondered if any of the events depicted here are from Martell's own life; the program doesn't definitively answer this question.) Howie and Mary also befriend a neighbor, a survivor of Auschwitz named Abie, who runs the nearby deli/grocery, and their experiences with him help them gain perspective and maturity. This is a gentle, compelling tale, and features excellent performances by Laurence Cantor (Abie), Sarah Hankins (Mary), and Ethan Sher (Howie).

Wrapping up the program is Chad Beckim's whisper of a play, The Bess Shit, in which Cesar and Diana say farewell to one another and to her East Village apartment. I was a little unclear as to the exact nature of their relationship—the apparent disparity in age between actors Alejandro Rodriguez and Jacqueline van Biene made me unsure whether they were former roommates, lovers, or something else. But Beckim has provided some gorgeous, lyrical writing about some of the small things we take for granted but ought to cherish as New York City-dwellers that make this piece a perfect summation for this charming evening of celebration of the spirit of Our Town.

Laura Livingston's direction of all four pieces is brisk though pitched perhaps more than it should be toward the center section of the audience (the Playhouse has seating on three sides of the stage). Simple, spare design elements work nicely throughout.

The festival continues with, as noted, another program of Chronicles, plus two series of Alphabet City plays, which are monologues based on the lives of local East Village residents. Watch for more reviews soon.