Culture clash at Baltimore Theatre Project
Playing through August 31st at the always-eclectic Baltimore Theatre Project is a new play by local playwright Mark Scharf, The Monroe Doctrine.
The project is produced by Vest Pocket Productions, directed by multi-talented Baltimore theater-maker Ann Turiano (also co-Artistic Director of Sisters Freehold), and features an array of seasoned local artists on stage and behind the scenes. All to bring to life a somewhat weather-beaten trailer and its equally threadbare denizen, along with the men and women who populate the circle of this family’s life–who find themselves amidst some enduring, baffling, life-altering questions that might sound familiar to many.
As noted in its materials, The Monroe Doctrine ponders, among other questions, what does success look like in today’s America? What does it mean when you Go for It and don’t make it? What does making it look like? Who decides and assigns the value for this? Where do artistic, intellectual, or academic pursuits fit in a modern economy, society, or culture determined to toss them on the trash heap of history?
In the play, poet and adjunct professor Real Monroe tries to hold the precarious pieces of his world together from his trailer on Hog Island. A very real place, here theatrically relocated off Maryland’s Eastern shore. It’s Memorial Day weekend and three generations of the family’s men–counterbalanced by three strong, grounded women–gather (for perhaps the last time) at the behest of the Korean War-veteran grandfather, a cantankerous paterfamilias and willful refugee from an assisted living facility. When Real’s estranged sons and a few other outside perspectives arrive to fill out the picture, expectations and reality collide; and even the students he has worked hard to help leave him scrambling for solid ground in a shifting landscape of obligations, power, regret, legacy, and dashed dreams.
You can hear the playwright reflect on these and other questions explored in the play in our chat here
and you can find tickets, details, and more information online at https://theatreproject.org/
