This is the fifth year of Orange County's lone festival for new plays from greater OC-area playwrights, and based on reading the scripts, it was the finest collection to date. All received full-fledged productions, including four one-acts and two full-length productions. The one-acts included Leonard Joseph Dunham's deceptively deep comedy about young and mature love, Love's Lost Words; David Scaglione's disturbing take on the things we secretly want to say to our partners but don't (or do we?), Spoken Allowed; and Joni Ravenna's equally disturbing Corrupt Impressions or the Dangerous Ones. The full-length shows included Diana Burbano's Fabulous Monsters, about a couple of aging punk rockers trying to grab that brass ring one more time, albeit with far shakier hands, and perhaps the most fleshed-out of the plays, Robert Riemer's dark, twisted, funny, fucked-up Grace Note, about a family that makes yours resemble the Cunninghams. They were a joy to read and further proof that artistic director Tamiko Washington and associate artistic director Eric Eberwein deserve their own stars on the Orange County Theater Walk of Fame (we're thinking somewhere off Bake Parkway in Irvine, only because it was always a laugh passing a freeway exit named Bake on the way to a Dead show at Irvine Meadows . . .).
