Lindenhurst theater to host one-act plays on movies

Marian King of Bay Shore is feeling a touch of opening-night jitters leading up to her debut at age 77 as a professional playwright.

“I’m a little nervous about how it’s going to turn out, but excited to see the audience’s reaction,” said King, a retired piano teacher whose last play was a 1980s elementary school musical about the biblical Jonah. King’s “Popcorn: A One-Act Play in Thought Balloons,” is being presented at “South Shore Theatre Experience Goes to the Movies,” a one-act play festival in Lindenhurst running Thursday-Saturday. Each of the eight- to 12-minute playlets have a common theme — the movies.

“We wanted to end the summer on a fun note before school starts,” said artistic director Deborah Cascio Plezia.

King’s son, regional theater actor Sean King, 53, of Levittown, told his mom about the festival and urged her to try her hand at comedy writing, she said. “It popped into my head that it should be about a couple going to the movies.” Her festival entry stars her son and Plezia as a married couple who reveal their true feelings to each other on a movie date. “If you like old movies, you are going to love my play,” Marian King says.

Six other Long Island playwrights answered the nonprofit theater’s call, spread by word-of-mouth and social media, to write new, funny cinema-centric works.

THE SCRIPT DOCTOR IS IN

Plezia also serves as the festival play doctor helping the new authors edit and rewrite their entries. All put a handful of characters through a variety of silly situations on a single shared set: a row of movie seats.

The concept was red meat for Larry Hart, 49, of Massapequa, whose day job is managing a McDonald’s in his neighborhood. In his satire “Fresh Out of Ideas,” a quartet of hack screenwriters make cringeworthy pitches for movie remakes, sequels and reboots. Hart’s favorite bit is when one writer, told that his shark attack idea was already done as “Jaws,” asks, “But has it been done as a musical?”

The screenwriter’s craft is also fodder for “I’ll Have What She’s Having” by Brian Schwimmer, 48, of Massapequa Park. Schwimmer, a family business owner with a sideline writing plays, wove about 100 classic movie lines into his rom-com set inside a police station. Schwimmer doesn’t actually quote the famous punchline from the deli scene in “When Harry Met Sally,” but he does work in Mae West’s immortal “Why don’t you come up and see me?” 

Among the others on the bill are the spoof “The Shining: A Parody,” by Kristie Bellucci, 34, of Lake Grove and “Visionary,” a Hollywood satire and the 94th regional theater production by journalist-playwright John Blenn, 60, of East Meadow. In Blenn’s play, a Long Islander pitches a movie about his 93-year-old grandmother to a Hollywood mogul.

“The guy wants to add robots, superheroes and cleavage to punch up the grandmother’s story,” Blenn said.

For Anna Marie May, 44, of Lindenhurst, who used the pen name Grace Walker for her debut “Endings,” a memory piece about two men revisiting a pair of iconic 1980s movie hits, the festival is a great chance to both share her work and grow as an artist.

“I’m glad to get the opportunity to do this,” she said, “because an audience response teaches you so much.”