Once a month, local actors and writers get together, usually at a brewery, and practice their craft. The actors read what the playwrights have been working on; the playwrights hear how their words sound coming from the actors.
The nights, called NCPLab, are the work of Broward County professional theater company New City Players. Now the company has a new tradition: take a handful of their favorite works from the sessions and put them together as an evening of short plays. On Friday, Sept. 27 and Saturday, Sept. 28, the company kicks off its 2024-25 season with “Lauder Made,” its latest evening of five short plays.
“We started this event called NCPLab a little over five years ago, before the pandemic in 2019,” says Timothy Mark Davis, NCP’s producing artistic director. “It started as a thing for actors. Pretty quickly it morphed into people bringing in plays they were working on. It was kind of just like a homegrown development process. It’s a great way for theater people to interact.”
And it produces some quality work, the best of which goes on stage, he says.
“Each year, we’re looking at what are our top five plays that have been submitted in the past year,” says Davis.
This year’s event is also informed by the space in which it will take place, Davis says. They’re holding it at General Provision, a coworking space in downtown Fort Lauderdale that also hosts events and housed in a historic hotel building that dates to the 1920s.
Davis recalls that as he and Christopher Notarnicola, one of the writers who regularly attends NCPLab sessions, walked through the space, they started thinking about local history and a sense of place.
Both are Fort Lauderdale natives, but they agreed that the city itself doesn’t have the feel of an overly rooted place.
“I feel really disconnected from the history of our community,” says Davis. “We battle maintaining our history. We have a struggle with our own history a little bit, and a disconnect from it.”
As they narrowed down the short plays to the five that would be used, Notarnicola also began working on a monologue of sorts, a narrator who would appear between the plays and tie them to each other and allow for a sense of place.
At first glance, the selected plays didn’t have much in the way of unity. They were looking at different plots, different characters.
“But they all share certain themes that I tried to connect really loosely in the way that we might connect themes in a personal essay or a narrative essay,” says Notarnicola.
And that the plays weren’t specifically about Fort Lauderdale per se or local history, Davis says he feels the device works.
“It connected this kind of shell around the five plays,” he says.
For Notarnicola, who also wrote one of the five short plays, writing the narrative helped him grow as a writer.
“It was a fun challenge,” he says. “I find it difficult to write towards someone else’s ideas.”
And he thought about place, about his home. “I’m trying to think of the idea of a person who is expressing an admiration for this place through the themes that are expressed through these plays. The cohesion is almost poetic in that it’s image-driven, less direct. The connections will hopefully be intuitive.”
The five plays include Notarnicola’s “All’s Fair,” “Hoodie Brown” by Harold Petion, “Complicatted” (cq) by Laurie Tanner, Michael Gioia’s “The Present” and “Such Great Heights” by Samara Siskind.
Davis believes the short play format is a way to introduce theatergoers who are new to NCP and its work. Two of the company’s goals involve creating transformative theater and building community, according to Davis.
“Anything we do is oscillating between those two ideas,” he says. With this year’s “Lauder Made,” he believes they’re hitting on both counts.
“This event specifically, really invests in our local community,” he says. “It’s also a real celebration of one of the things that makes our company unique.”
IF YOU GO
WHAT: “New City Players Presents Short Plays, “Lauder Made””
WHERE: General Provision, 300 SW 1st Ave., Fort Lauderdale
WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday, Sept. 27 and 3 and 8 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 28
TICKETS: $25, VIP $30 (includes a glass of wine)
INFORMATION: Call (954) 376-6114 or
http://newcityplayers.org
