Las Vegas Little Theatre to present New Works Competition winner

The Las Vegas Little Theatre is heating up its 34th season with "Spearminted," a play by local playwright Erica Griffin that is anything but ordinary, and that's just what the theater's organizers hoped.

The play is the winner of the theater's fourth New Works Competition.

"We had about 20 entries this year," said Walter Niejadlik, president of the board of directors of the Las Vegas Little Theatre. "That's less than some years, but the competition was really solid. It was really hard to choose from the last three or four."

The play features 11, a young slacker who earns his living as a sign twirler and cares for his disabled grandmother, and PIPH, a headstrong stripper who was recently demoted to the morning shift. Both characters have dreams of escaping their depressing existence and meet when PIPH accidentally hits 11 with her car, which causes 11 to lose his memory. As PIPH helps him recover, an unlikely romance develops, which is threatened by his returning memories. The play features partial nudity.

"It was written as a two-person play, but I've added a third person as what I'm calling a chorus," said director Shawn Hackler. "It's sort of a scene change logistics thing."

Griffin hasn't been able to be as involved with the production of the play as either she or Hackler would prefer, but they've kept communicating, mostly via email.

"There's a certain amount of trust you've got to put into the director of a premiere," Griffin said. "Those first reviews have the power to determine if a play has a life beyond the first staging or not."

For Hackler, the prospect of working on a new play was both daunting and exhilarating.

"You've got nothing to go off of from former productions, so you have a tremendous amount of leeway to explore the text completely independent of anything else," Hackler said. "You get to sort of rack your brain and the cast's brain and work directly with the playwright."

Hackler said he's still fairly new to directing, although he directed the first New Works Competition play and has directed for Insurgo Theater and his own production company. He agreed to direct the play before he had a chance to read it, based on Griffin's previous work he had seen and read.

"I like her work. I like her style. I like her brain," Hackler said.

Familiarity with Griffin didn't help her win the competition as the three-person panel that initially reads all the submissions does so without knowing the identity of the author.

"They have a score sheet and judge the plays on things like creativity, originality, theme and other factors," Niejadlik said. "There are points added for being a local, too, because we want to encourage local writers. We tally up the scores, and the highest five come to the final judge, which was me this year."

The competition seeks plays that can be told in a black box theater, with minimal sets and props. They're also looking for works geared toward a younger audience ranging from 18 to 40.

The play was something that had been percolating for years. Griffin originally conceived the characters while living at the Katherine Gianaclis Park for the Arts and hosting weekly workshops in the center's black box.

"I wanted to create these two characters who made a living on the periphery of things, like sign twirling and stripping," Griffin said. "I wanted them to have nothing in common except the fact that they both moved their body for strangers to make a living. I wanted them to meet because of an accident, one hitting the other with their car, and see what would happen."

Later, while watching a reading of the Johnna Adams play "Nurture," winner of the Sin City New Play Contest at the Onyx Theatre, Griffin figured out how she wanted to tell the characters' story.

"Her play was a revelation," Griffin said. "It had only two characters, but it kept moving along and had constant surprises. I went home that very night and wrote furiously - well, only when my toddler was sleeping - for two months straight and came up with 'Spearminted.' "

Griffin described the play as a quirky, dark comedy set in modern-day Las Vegas that examines the differences between the fantasy world and the real world of the sexes and that confusing place in between.

"Spearminted" is scheduled to open Friday and run through May 15 in the Las Vegas Little Theatre Black Box at 3920 Schiff Drive. Performances are scheduled at 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $15 for adults and $14 for seniors and students. For more information, visit lvlt.org or call the box office at 362-7996.

Contact Sunrise/Whitney View reporter F. Andrew Taylor at ataylor@viewnews.com or 380-4532.