Summer Shorts 2: Series A

Photo/Carol Rosegg

For those of you who have been keeping tabs on this race, you know that there's only one thing I love more than aesthetics, and that's festivals--where else can you catch such an eclectic variety of shows all at once? Compressing so much work often leads to a lot of misfires, all at once, but it also means that when a show succeeds, it really leaves a mark. For Series A, that show was Roger Hedden's Deep in the Hole, a nonstop satire of the partying life--that is, what is "too much"? Billy Hopkins builds the action slowly, going from an argument about the deadening woes of bottom-shelf liquor to a rousing game of spin the bottle and ultimately to its logical conclusion: accidentally possibly snorting anthrax. (That sentence makes more sense in context.) The whole thing is held together by the four actors, especially the carelessly suave David Ross, but it's the everyday tone that defines this piece.

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