Sam’s Salon, October 2015
Host Sam Barrett, patiently corralling readers Anelysa
Gove, Joanne Naughton, and Cathy Fallon, and audience members Susan Trigiani and Robin Cashin.
I’m a little late on this one, but last weekend, Sam’s salon was graced by the literary stylings of local playwright Lindsay Harris Friel in a little piece she likes to call, This is Halloween. Timeliness aside, it was cool to see a play with a plot I’d never seen before, to wit, how to explain to a six-foot-two, mentally-challenged twenty-something that he’s too old to go trick-or-treating, despite the fact that he has the mental and emotional capacity of a nine-year-old. The young man in question (Norman) is never on stage; we’re presented this problem through his adult sister, her friend, and her not-quite-friend. The delicate addressing of Norman’s behavior is carefully layered with social problems: Norman’s costume scares the children of the two friends, the people in the community are reluctant to open the door to a twenty-something trick-or-treater, and the not-quite-friend had, in the past, given birth to a challenged baby, whom she had decided she could not care for. All this, fondly decorated with pumpkin carving and a knife fight.
Playwright Lindsay Harris Friel, accepting abuse from audience members Alex Dremann and Darrin Britting and Host Sam Barrett.