Tales From the Swift

Every year, Jill Forbath Roden gets an unusually wide window on the national zeitgeist.

The playwright and theater director sits at home in Irvine, and hundreds of other writers from around the country send her short slices of what’s on their minds, in the form of 10-minute plays.

Forbath Roden digs in and each spring announces her three favorites: the winners of the West Coast Ten-Minute Play Festival, which she launched in 1994.

The winners get modest prizes of $50 to $100. The public gets to see them, as Forbath Roden presents her annual “Six at Eight” show--an evening of 10-minute plays featuring her three prize winners and three other plays culled from the extensive 10-minute archives of the Humana Festival of New American Plays. This year’s showcase plays weekends through June 18 at the Vanguard Theatre in Fullerton.

Last year gave Forbath Roden a voyeur’s-eye view on a lot of scripts about sex.

“I think Bill Clinton did that to me,” she says.

This year, an inordinate number of the 400 entries involved guns; to Forbath Roden, that meant the Columbine massacre had superseded the Monica Lewinsky affair in the dramatic imagination.

The winner, “Steel Springs,” by Los Angeles playwright Ryan Kelly, is a gripping war story in which a terrified recruit gets a life-or-death lesson in battlefield survival from his sergeant--and proves a shockingly apt pupil.

Actors Theatre of Louisville sparked the 10-minute play movement in 1979 when it began folding a national 10-minute play contest--with a $1,000 first prize--into the larger Humana Festival.

“The form has exploded nationally,” said Jon Jory, the Actors Theatre producing director who championed the 10-minute play contest. “It’s wonderful for young writers--like starting your Olympic weight training with a little less weight on the bar.”

But the Louisville contest also has been an outlet for literary first-stringers, including prize winners Tony Kushner, Tina Howe, Marsha Norman, Howard Korder, Lanford Wilson and Joyce Carol Oates.

Actors Theatre has published five anthologies of plays from its 10-minute festival, comprising 125 plays in all. Annual sales are about 5,000 copies for each volume--an indicator, Jory says, of the widespread acceptance and appetite for quickie plays.

John Glore, the literary manager at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, shared first prize at Humana in 1991 for his 10-minute play, “What She Found There.”

A good 10-minute play, Glore says, “can’t just be a 10-minute slice of life or excerpt from a longer play. Like any play, it has to capture a full-bodied story, with a strong beginning, middle and end. Which means [building to] a turning point, a surprise or a major discovery on the part of the central character.”

“The form is unforgiving,” says Jory. “There are a lot of people who just don’t write well in a situation where there is no time for a leisurely walk off the main road. It takes a kind of reductive mind to do it best.”

Glore likes to assign 10-minute plays when he teaches playwrights’ seminars: “It’s a great way for a new writer to gain the experience of finishing something. They have a sense of accomplishment that comes from actually completing a project.”

The West Coast Ten-Minute Play Festival sprang from one of Glore’s classes at SCR. Forbath Roden took the course, was introduced to the form and concluded that an evening of 10-minute plays would be an ideal way to give local playwrights some exposure.

As the then-artistic director at the Camino Real Playhouse in San Juan Capistrano, she had a forum; she put money raised by selling cookies, drinks and pie at intermission into a prize kitty, got out the word and received 60 submissions.

Since then, interest has grown each year; the Internet has been a useful conduit, and playwright circles from around the country frequently submit entries.

Forbath Roden thinks the 10-minute form is especially useful for topical plays and social commentary. This year’s second-place winner, “The Rental,” by L.A. writer Mark Levine, is a whimsical comedy about what women want and don’t want from men. But “Fat Cats and Other Party Animals,” from Houston writer Kyle Mercer, is a grotesque satire on the appetites of the wealthy that owes a debt to Luis Bunuel.

“In a 10-minute play you can get across a concept or theme without being annoying,” Forbath Roden said. “You can talk about things the people might not let you talk about for two hours.”

Forbath Roden admits she tailors her choices to local tastes and to the tenor of the theaters hosting the 10-minute festival. Last year, she moved it from the Camino Real, a community theater, to the more daring Vanguard.

Still, certain plays that appeal to her get left aside. “I didn’t use the play about special [sex] props. It was something a woman would use when she’s . . . . I don’t want to go any further. It was excellent, but are Orange County audiences going to go there? I don’t get a lot of plays that are safe. Most of them are pretty darn strange.”

By the time next year’s eighth annual West Coast Ten-Minute Play Festival rolls around, Forbath Roden hopes to have secured nonprofit status. Donations could boost prize money, which hasn’t grown since the days when she raided the pie and coffee till. She keeps production budgets small: This year, with the Vanguard Theatre Ensemble splitting the costs, she expects to spend about $2,800 to mount “Six at Eight.”

Some day, Forbath Roden would like to take a chapter from the Humana Festival and publish an anthology of winners from her festival. That would put them in circulation around the country.

“I’m looking for something that’s going to make people talk about it after it’s over,” she says. “There’s a lot of work out there where you’re going to be entertained and have a night out, but I’m looking for something that makes people think.”

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“Six at Eight,” presented by Vanguard Theatre Ensemble and the West Coast Ten-Minute Play Festival, at the Vanguard Theatre, 699A S. State College Blvd., Fullerton. Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 5 p.m. Ends June 18. $13 to $15. (714) 526-8007.