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Meat of the matter >> A 12-year-old heroine takes a trip down Mad Alley in SOS: Meat 'N Make Mary
"It's not like I set out to be difficult," Roberts opined recently. "It's just that what I like as an audience member is big, elaborate stuff. Like opera, where there's a lot going on--elaborate storylines and relationships." SOS doesn't fit the Fringe mould in another way: it's much longer than the one-hour maximum that Fringe audiences can normally be expected to sit through. "It's a big ol' beast," as Roberts puts it. The producing company, Beautiful Downtown, in association with Playwrights' Workshop, has solved the problem by breaking it into two parts: Part I will be presented Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday of next week, while Part II takes the stage Monday, Thursday and the following Sunday. SOS is an original idea, although Roberts says it was initially inspired by some extracurricular reading into world mythologies, specifically the nearly universal hero myth. The "hero" of her play is a 12-year-old girl, Mary, whose world is thrown off-kilter by the departure of her older brother to find work. Mary follows Roland into a "world turned on its head" called Mad Alley. Roberts' writing is dense and poetic, and a joy to hear spoken. The cast of this production, directed by Peter Hinton, features many familiar faces, including Jennifer Morehouse, Emma Campbell, Chip Chuipka and Sean Devine. Eric Goulem plays the brother. The role of Mary is played by Amena Ahmad, one of several teenagers from FACE high school who are featured in the show. So what's up with that title? The Mary part, at least, is obvious. "Meat," Roberts explains, "is a central theme in the whole play. There's a butcher in the second part who is a main obstacle that Mary has to overcome." SOS is short for Songs of Sex, the title of a series the piece was originally part of, before it grew into something quite different. "I know," Roberts says. "I'm going to have to deal with the title at some point." --Amy Barratt
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Like all of the playwrights with work in this year's Fringe, Emma C. Roberts is looking forward to seeing her play "on its feet," as they say. The cumbersomely titled SOS: Meat 'N Make Mary has plenty of feet to stand on: 38 of them, to be exact. A cast of 19 is virtually unheard of on the Fringe circuit, where one-, two- and three-person shows are the norm, mainly because they're cheaper and a lot more portable.