Nicu’s Spoon theater is located at 38 West 38th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues, on the fifth floor of a nondescript building that, from the outside, looks nothing like a venue that would house a theater. A blank steel door serves as entrance. Only a small placard reading “Spoon Theater,” taped to the wall next to the door, announces the theater’s existence.
The theater itself is a small, hot, room. There is no stage--just a small performing space, and three rows of six or seven seats for audience members. But the space is intimate, and well-suited for the reading of a play like Beckwith’s, which involves close interactions between numerous actors at once, with the action taking place largelyin one room.
The playwright was very happy with the experience: “It’s so hard to get a show put on in New York City,” says Beckwith, who lives in Vermont and has been writing plays for three decades. When she won the contest, she says, “What I really won was a performing space in New York.” The presentation, while certainly not a full production, was more than just a stationary reading: Directed by Monica Callan, it was real a performance, complete with blocking. While a woman sat off to the side reading occasional stage directions, the six actors and actresses -- Griffin Hennelly, Judd Silverman, Mary Scripps, Erin Callahan, Bob Carmody, and F. Brett Cox -- moved about the stage, scripts in hand, performing their parts with humor and emotion. The play is about a young man named Ted, played by Griffin Hennelly, who answers a job interview ad that seems eerily specific to him: It calls, among other things, for an archeology student who knows Morse Code. The “interview” takes place on an island owned by a billionaire, named Mr. Solomon, who never appears in the play. Ted soon realizes that something’s amiss: Among other things, his “interviewers” -- including a deceptively genial man named Mr. Cook, played by Judd Silverman, and a scientist named Dr. Butler, played by Bob Carmody -- ask invasive questions about his life, and make odd requests, such as asking for a blood sample. The experience bears no resemblance to a job interview, and Ted grows increasingly uncomfortable as his hosts seem unwilling to let him leave the island.
By the end of the play, Ted learns that he has been summoned because he is in fact a clone of the billionaire Solomon, who has replicated himself in the hope of finding a worthy heir.
Beckwith says she began writing her play partly because cloning was a subject that intrigued. Because human cloning is now essentially scientifically possible, she says, she finds it dramatically fascinating to imagine a world where it has secretly taken place at the whim of a billionaire.
While Beckwith has seen some of her plays more fully produced in the past, she still greatly enjoyed the performance. She says there is nothing like seeing one’s play come to life through live performance, and she was very pleased with the jobs the actors did.
In addition, she says, seeing her play performed helped her detect and eliminate some minor flaws in the play that she hadn’t noticed before. So, says, Beckwith, the experience was not only fun, but it will prove useful as she tries to shop her play elsewhere in the future.
