Play festival offers ‘Apricot Supernovas’

An orange rolls across the stage. So begins “Apricot Supernovas” by playwright Krista Knight, in which an obese boy constructs a model of the cosmos made of fruit. Asked why he chose fruit as his medium, the fat character – played by a thin actor – tells his babysitter, “It decays!”

“Apricot Supernovas,” seen at Goshen College in 2007 and in Seattle’s “Live Girls! Quickies Short Play Festival” in May, already has entered the canon of new American plays. It is one of 14 scripts listed on the resume of young, New-York based playwright Krista Knight.

Knight’s “Filling,” which is among offerings at Penobscot Theatre’s second annual Northern Writes New Play Festival, is a script in development. “Filling” has received a staged reading by Page 73 Productions in New York in June 2007, followed by its Equity Workshop production in December 2007. During 2008 the script became a finalist in the Bay Area Playwrights Festival.

“Filling” is among 23 plays chosen by Penobscot Theatre out of more than 500 submissions from 35 states and four countries. “Filling” puts science on stage in a way that a Bangor audience will find both jarring and familiar – insects in the throes of puberty.

Protagonist Nolan is 13, excitable and “a larval insect bloating without his exoskeleton.” Love interest Lily is described as “molting. 14.” Nolan, who has come (legally?) from Mexico to live with his randy grandmother in California, begins the play hiding under her porch. We cringe when Nolan agrees to emerge so gang-member Bern can “wail on him” in exchange for critical social information.

The beating does occur at center stage, except that “Bern is small and sticky and Nolan is large and squishy. The blows barely bruise him.”

Replete with fecund sexual imagery, the play constantly surprises as Nolan, the alien outcast, imagines and executes his own flawed plan to impact nature and society.

A California native, Knight graduated from Brown University in 2006 with a double concentration in theater and English. She lives in New York City where she received a master’s degree in performance studies from the Tisch Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University in May. She is a playwright in residence at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., during May and June. She plans to travel to Bangor for her reading. Knight especially looks forward to the facilitated audience discussion, which will be led by Penobscot Theatre Producing Artistic Director Scott R.C. Levy.

Most of the presentations in the two-week festival are staged readings. However, “Filling” will be presented as a workshop production, along with “Lessons and Carols” by Demetra Kareman of Brooklyn, N.Y. That script was the overall winner of the 2008 Dylan Days writing competition. Workshop productions include an abbreviated rehearsal process, and simple blocking and effects as actors hold scripts in hand. Both scripts will be directed by Penobscot Theatre director-in-residence, Nathan Halvorson.

“Filling” appears at 8 p.m. Friday, June 6, at the Bangor Opera House.