Red Door opens with well acted preview

by Sharon Falduto

Red Door - Red Door Shorts is a taste of the upcoming shows at Iowa City’s latest theatre company, this one dedicated to doing all original pieces. Rather than a staid showcase of each of the upcoming offerings, the show is presented in sketch format. Each piece flows into the next, with short interstitials that are sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant, and always well acted in between.

The actors for the show all uniformly dressed in black shirts and blue jeans, with one costume change near the end for a sitcom-esque piece in which a group of less-than-bright roommates plots how to rob a bank.

Each actor has a very expressive face, which the audience was able to see clearly in the intimate space. Red Door Shorts was performed at Public Space One, downstairs underneath Herteen and Stocker Jewelers. Three lines of folding chairs were set up in front of a slightly elevated stage, the set of which was decorated like a small studio apartment. Sometimes the set WAS an apartment. Other times it wasn’t there, or was just a background for the chairs that served as a car, or as furniture in Anita Liberty’s piece How to Heal the Hurt By Hating. In that particular scene, one of the folding chairs the actresses were using didn’t open up again on cue as it needed to. The actress seamlessly threw the chair aside and sat on the floor, all without breaking character. Meanwhile one of the actors ran out and replaced it, in a move so fluid it may very well have actually been part of the script, and not a technical difficulty.

The interstitials didn’t seem to have much relationship to the snippets of shows being presented, but they did have running themes. We got to see Newtons’ Laws of Physics demonstrated throughout the show. A young lady did some fun playacting with a broom. I’m not sure if this was intentional, but the same young lady was in charge of another stick later in the production, this time the handle of a mop that was serving as part of a device to keep a “sample zombie” at bay.

Red Door Shorts whets the audience’s appetite for an upcoming season of fascinating, locally written theater.


Sharon Falduto has been involved with theatre for many years. Notable roles include Corrie in Barefoot in the Park with Dreamwell and Myra in Hay Fever with ICCT. She has directed God for the now defunct student group, West Side Players, and Of Mice and Men for Dreamwell. She is currently out of the theatre scene, as she is busy directing the lives of Rachel, Samantha, and Piper at her home in Coralville. She still enjoys the stage, however, and hopes to trod the boards again in the future.