Review: FERTILE GROUND 2025 ROUNDUP #3 at Various

Fertile Ground 2025 ended on Saturday. Once again, it was a fabulous opportunity to see what our amazing local theatre makers have been working on. Here’s my final roundup. (If you missed the first two, you can find them here and here.)

Twas the Night Before

Laura Anne Harris’s new play might sound like a familiar story – a family gathers for Christmas, secrets are revealed – but be prepared for your expectations to be subverted. This family drama (which is also good for plenty of laughs) is original and surprising, and I found it quite refreshing. Yes, there are arguments, and yes, there are big secrets, but the main thing I took away was the huge amount of love everyone had for one another. Picture August: Osage County, but everyone listens to and supports one another rather than actively looking for ways to cause harm.

Overall, I very much enjoyed the reading, and I would love to see this play produced.

A Window into Tennessee

This one-person play about Tennessee Williams – skillfully crafted by Sandra de Helen and excellently performed by Michael J. Teufel – was one of the highlights of my festival schedule. The play portrays Williams at three phases of his life: in his prime, after he’s had success with The Glass Menagerie and Streetcar, and later, when he’s lost the love of his life. At each phase, he reflects on his life, his work, and the intersections between the two – sometimes with pride, often with regret. He drinks too much, and takes pills and lovers, to shield his own insecurities.

Watching this play felt like watching one of Williams’s masterpieces, with all of the raw emotion of desire, isolation, sadness. It was wonderful.

unbound: a bookish musical

This new musical, with book and music by erin rachel, is another show with a ton of heart. Jane, newly divorced and feeling lost, works at a local bookstore facing financial difficulties. She and her team of book lovers get one last chance to save the store, which is a centerpiece of the community and also a popular tourist destination. unbound draws inspiration from ‘90s rom coms as well as popular musicals of yesterday and today. The characters are quirky and charming, the music is heartfelt, and there’s a lot of delightful word play for the grammar nerds among us.

The Fertile Ground show was a concert reading of songs and scenes from Act I, along with a few songs from Act II. It was beautifully sung by a cast that mixed familiar faces with newcomers. I look forward to learning how it all turns out!

The Redemption Show

The Fertile Ground Festival is always a grab bag, and for me this show was the grab baggiest of them all – four wildly different pieces of performance art by four wildly different performers, all connected in their exploration of some aspect of women’s experience. Sam Cimino’s “Mysticaloom” was a mood piece about our relationship with the natural world incorporating music, movement, and film; Nikki Flinn’s “Mesmerized” took a carnival barker approach to exposing the hypocrisy and power dynamics that lie behind the veil of religion; Lauren Frey’s “SMARTER” was a funny and all-too-true depiction of a young woman’s first experience in corporate America; and Kat Freya’s “Fangirl” was a very impressive dance about teenage celebrity obsession.

I don’t have much experience with performance art, which was exactly why I wanted to see this. Fertile Ground gives us the opportunity to explore new things and push the boundaries of how we understand and relate to art. This collection of solo works certainly did that for me!