nothin At Long Wharf, Addiction, Shootings, & Trip… | New Haven Independent

At Long Wharf, Addiction, Shootings, & Trip To Uganda

A handful of people in a scrappy Alcoholics Anonymous group, struggling to get sober and help everyone else stay sober, one day at a time. Two cops in Cleveland, and what happens when one of them pulls the trigger. A family in Uganda, each person in it just trying to make their way.

Three plays — Torrey Townsend’s Night Workers, Kevin Artigue’s Sheepdog, and Angella Emurwon’s Strings — make their debut at Long Wharf Theatre in the theater’s fourth annual New Works Festival. They’ll be performed as staged readings: Strings on Friday, Sept. 21 and Night Workers and Sheepdog on Saturday, Sept. 22.

The plays’ arrival in New Haven are partly the result of a lot of sleuthing from Christine Scarfuto, Long Wharf’s literary manager, who spends, by her estimation, 60 to 70 percent of her time reading new plays (“I love my job,” she said) looking for works that catch her interest and that might be a good fit for Long Wharf. Normally, she said, she finds new plays by talking to the literary managers of other theaters, attending theater festivals when she can, paying attention to festivals around the country, and generally keeping her ear low to the ground in the theater world.

Brian Slattery Photo

Except,” Scarfuto said, none of the plays this year came to me through those channels.” Scarfuto found Night Workers because she knows the director, Knud Adams, who had directed Townsend’s plays in the past and is doing the same at Long Wharf. Artigue has been a colleague of Scarfuto’s since their days as students together at the University of Iowa, and I knew he had that play,” Scarfuto said. Meanwhile, Scarfuto came across Emurwon’s work before she even started work at Long Wharf, and had been looking for the right time to put on Strings. Now, it turns out, is the time.

The script of Night Workers is marked by Townsend’s ear for his characters’ voices. As a playwright, he’s adept at capturing the weariness and hopefulness of his characters as they work to put their lives back together. He finds the humor in the routine of recovery. Moments of sadness land with weight. And Scarfuto, who chose the plays this summer, found a certain timeliness in the way substance abuse and addiction is a part of the conversation in New Haven. Townsend’s play humanizes his addicts without romanticizing their addiction. It’s a frank look at their problems, and a nuanced, wry, and quietly heart-wrenching look on what it takes for each of them to come to terms with their alcoholism and figure out how to live with it, even if they can never quite put it behind them.

Artigue, meanwhile, pulls the drama of Sheepdog straight from the all-too-persistent headlines of police shootings of African-Americans. But he finds a way to dig beneath them, too. His narrator, Amina, is an African-American cop who falls in love with a fellow (white) officer, Ryan. They’re deep into their relationship when Ryan is involved in the shooting and killing of an African-American man under questionable circumstances. Sheepdog plays like a tightly wound thriller that’s also a glimpse behind the blue wall (Scarfuto revealed that Artigue interviewed some of her relatives who are in law enforcement in New York City) behind which police protect their own. It acknowledges both the difficulty of police work and the police force’s responsibility to the public. It shows the ways the job can get to you without letting anyone off the hook.

Finally, Strings may be a family drama, but the setting and Emurwon’s way with the English language breathe new life into the form. The tensions in the family give us a glimpse into how Ugandan society is different and the same as ours. The way the characters speak to each other is a feast of words. And, as Scarfuto pointed out, it’s refreshing to see a story told in Africa that doesn’t deal with war, grinding poverty, or genocide. Instead, it’s the story of an older woman dealing with her past, now that her husband is returning home after decades away, and a younger woman figuring out how to come into her own.

Putting on the plays as staged readings rather than full productions is part of what allows Long Wharf to put on three different plays in the same weekend, before it opens its regular season with The Roommate on Oct. 10.

A staged reading, Scarfuto said, also puts the focus on the language.” With plays like these, you could argue that’s where it always belongs.

The New Works Festival runs Sept. 21 and 22 at Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Dr. Tickets are $10 per play or $24 for all three plays. Click here for more information.

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