Margin Notes: Circle Festival 2025: Between Us and Close Encounters

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.

Into Your Hands: A man, distraught and angry over the suicide of a childhood friend, sorts through a scattering pile of sheet music to play at the funeral, at the request of a grieving mother: "[The priest is] gonna pray you off, and then I'm gonna play you off." When he receives his inheritance from his friend: a turtle figurine he broke as a child, complete with Elmer's glue and the detached foot, he breaks his brooding silence to explain to both the turtle and his absent friend just how very fucked all of this is. How unfair. How inconsiderate. How mortifying. Angry at his friend, at the turtle, at the insincere mourners he know will arrive, at the destruction wreaked on his friend's parents, at his own abandonment, Jonah lashes and lashes again at the specter of a man who can no longer answer back. Threatening to play music he knows his friend hated, or to play music of fire and damnation, he cannot find peace in the unstable world he is now left to navigate. Frustrated, he spits out, "I want you to be a struggle to remember. But that can't happen, because then you'd get your way."

Into Your Hands very much feels like the beginning of a longer piece, even with the satisfying button at the end. Perhaps it's just that we know anger is only one of the traditional stages of grief, and so seeing him able to move straight to a sort of acceptance feels like we skipped a few beats on the way to the end. Actor/writer Nick Navari is an excellent storyteller, both as creator and performer, and while this current iteration explores mostly the immediate anger of grief, I think he could easily expand and deepen this piece while maintaining the sardonic humor and resentful affection that feel so vital to the voice of this man. 

Nick Navari in Into Your Hands. Photo Tamar Shemesh.

Enmeshment: This is a slumber party. This is a birthday party at a bar. This is a pride of lionesses on the hunt. This is a desperate grasp for connection. This is a practiced plea for escape. This is passive aggression and platonic love and sensual love and love lost. This is a woman, trapped in a toxic friendship, declaring she will peel her skin, regrow a new shell "like a fucking crustacean if [she has] to."

Enmeshment is a series of vignettes tracking the complicated and layered relationships girls and women and nonbinary people navigate with each other, from adolescence to teenhood to the messy life of post-college twenties. Devised by the company of five, it's a mixture of movement and dance, monologues, dialogues, and the intangibleness of the unspeakable. There is a joy in the chaos of the piece, as well as a tremoring sting in its pathos. This is one that will benefit from more clarity and throughline (for instance, it was unclear to me if each player was performing the same character throughout the years, or changing for each scene; it was also unclear what we were meant to take away from some of the moments). Particularly striking among the vignettes was the pas de deux between Gabrielle Villarreal and Zehava Younger, an aching reaching across pain and love. And the final beat will stay with me a long time: as two estranged (friends? ex-lovers?) reunite at an aquarium, one remarks, "I think the sparkly one is eating its friend." The other, looking as well, silently mouths, "What the fuck."

The cast of Enmeshment. Clockwise, starting at 11 o'clock: Isabella Sale,
Dru Sky Berrian, Cait Ladda, Gabrielle Villarreal, and Zehava Younger. 
Photo source.

Packed: It is appropriate for this play--about packing up Kim and Anna's apartment after their breakup, but with the packing being done by Kim's new lover Gail and Anna's friend Dina who nurses an unrequited crush on her--to be hosted by a festival honoring the legacy of Edward Allan Baker. His plays portrayed working class individuals with dignity, just trying to survive whatever knot they'd been tied into. Playwright/Director Elise Wilkes's rendering of Gail and Dina shows them both working jobs that have little to do with their loftier college majors, stuck in imbalanced relationships with the women who can't be bothered to help with the packing up of their own breakup. They are each tied into their own knots and must decide whether to stay there or break out.

Packed, if we're treating it as something in the pantheon with Baker's plays, doesn't need to be expanded. But I do think it could benefit by delving more into both Gail and Dina. Right now they are drawn with broad strokes, carrying backstories that seem straightforward and expected for a butch lesbian and a lipstick lesbian. I'd like to see the particularities that break them both out of simply being tropes and into two humans still trying to articulate their own identity in an unwelcoming world.

Don't Push the Red Button: A much more comedic take on the two-hander. Eli, a man with ambitions of getting cast in Survivor, who was in the vicinity of a private bunker, and doomsday prepper Mason--sorry, Doctor Mason of the Dirt People--are both sealed in Mason's bunker after a nuclear alert sent them underground. Bickering over cans of beans, notebooks tracking percentage possibilities, and their moral support sidekicks (Brenda the red button, Captain Spud the potato, and a lint clump homunculus), Eli and Mason go back and forth on whether it's safe to unseal their bunker and see what's left of the world.

Don't Push the Red Button is the kind of comedy--banter, and trading of straight man/clown status--that works best when it's fast and sharp. It's very funny, but not everything's landing just right yet. Some of that could be sharpened by a more thorough undressing of how each man ticks outside of his sketch-depth given circumstances, as well as a real sense of what they wanted when they were still above-ground. This thing has legs, for sure. It just needs a bit more toned muscle to run the way it could.

***

Running: Now playing at AMT Theater (Circle Festival 2025) - Opening: August 30, 2025. Closing: October 19, 2025.
Category: short plays