Circle Festival 2025:
Between Us and Close Encounters
Seen on: Saturday and Sunday, 9/06/25 and 9/07/25.
Plot and Background
RJ Theatre Company, in partnership with The Actor Launchpad, presents Circle Festival 2025 at AMT Theater. I was able to attend four of the twelve pieces presented:
Between Us combines two works:
Into Your Hands, Nick Navari's solo show on loss and letting go; and Caity Ladda's
Enmeshment, a monologue/duologue/movement piece about identity.
Close Encounters is another pairing: Elise Wilkes's
Packed, a comedy about two strangers packing up the apartment of another couple who have just broken up; and
Don't Push the Red Button by Zachary Mailhot, a comedy about the end of the world.
Thoughts:
Overall: I've always had a fondness for unfinished portraits and earlier painted drafts. Like the handwritten corrections in the archived papers of a writer, it's a secret passage into the thought process of artistic creation. What's rather exciting about this festival--or at least the pieces I saw--is it feels like the same secret passage. These all feel like works in progress: explorations and iterations, dancing around the idea that will be the lodestone of the piece, but is not quite articulated into its final polished form. Some feel like spaghetti drafts, some feel like only the first half or third of a story, but they each have a core strength that can only get stronger with more time and depth.
See below for individual pieces.
