Award-winning writer Victor Wishna is at it again. His short play, “The Impressionists,” will be presented at the 2015 Kansas City Fringe Festival. Wishna’s play is one of four that comprise “The Art is a Lie,” described as a thrilling new showcase of short plays that grapples — through the lens of art and its enigmatic allure — with immediate, contemporary issues such as domestic abuse, relationships in a time of technology, capitalism, commercialism, self-doubt and self-destruction.
Wishna said the four plays, ranging from lightly comic to disturbingly dark, will entertain and surprise audiences — and challenge them to reconsider their first impressions. {mprestriction ids="1,3"}The other three plays in “The Art is a Lie,” are new works by Kansas City playwrights Margaret Shelby and Lindsay Adams.
“They are all tied around the theme of art. The original idea was to stage these plays in an actual art gallery because all the plays are set in or around museums or galleries. They all examine different issues but through the lens of how art is perceived.”
Wishna said “The Impressionist,” which opens the show, is basically about a young woman and a young man who randomly meet at an art gallery.
It’s just 15-minutes long, so Wishna didn’t want to give away more of the plot. The other three plays are also short, as “The Art is a Lie,” takes only an hour to stage. A quick synopsis of the others are: “Would-be thieves argue about their latest heist; a moment of artistic triumph is undone by an act of vandalism and an artist and his subject struggle to stick to their roles.”
Wishna said, “In every circumstance, a deeper reality waits to be revealed. ‘We all know that art is not truth,” Pablo Picasso once said. ‘Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.’ ”
Wishna actually wrote “The Impressionists” two summers ago. It was performed at the City Theatre of Independence’s Original Playwrights Festival, where it won the award for Best Script.
“Lyndsay Adams saw it in Independence and she had the idea of putting together a series of short plays that all dealt around the themes of art and visual art and asked me if she could include it and I thought that was a great idea.”
“It wasn’t my idea to get us together to do this, but once I agreed to it, we are three co-producers and we are responsible for everything including interviewing the directors and casting our own shows.”
The KC Fringe Festival has been described as Kansas City’s Premiere Arts Festival. The 2015 festival runs from July 16 to July 26 and marks its 11th anniversary. The 11-day event is jam-packed with live theater, dance, burlesque, performance art, visual art, spoken word, film and fashion.
According to its executive director Cheryl Kimmi, who Wishna interviewed last year in his capacity as senior editor for KCMetropolis.org, Kansas City’s online journal of the arts, Fringe is a “wonderful place for artists to experiment, to put something out there and see how many people respond to it. We’re all volunteers, and we’ve proven that what we’re doing is important to the community. We’ve grown every single year. Audiences have returned and artists have returned,” she told Wishna and KCMetropolis.org.
Wishna explained that “the reason it’s called Fringe is because originally it was this idea of stuff that was on the fringe, as opposed to mainstream.”
“That has evolved and there is certainly a fringy element to it, there’s burlesque acts and things like that but especially in Kansas City Fringe has become this incubator for local writers and local talent to produce things.”
He enjoys being a part of an incubator, which is why he serves as the artistic director for the Midwest Dramatist Center, an organization that launched in April 2014. The Midwest Dramatists Center is a creative home, family and support for emerging playwrights to further the growth of their art and the impact of that art on the greater theater community.
“We accomplish this by providing the three key elements that every artists needs to succeed in bringing his or her vision to the public: a home, a community and guidance.”
“A lot of my job is networking with artistic directors and literary managers at theaters and festivals around the country that do new work with the idea of connecting our playwrights work with them. That’s been very cool and very fun. I think this is a sign of how theater in Kansas City is growing. Also, hopefully this is an organization that will fuel that growth. There is playwright organizations around the country but there is nothing like it in Kansas City,” he explained.
The Kansas City native lived in New York City for almost 12 years where he racked up a long list of accomplishments. With photographer Ken Collins, he published “In Their Company: Portraits of American Playwrights” (Umbrage Editions, 2006), which won an Independent Publisher Book Awards Silver Medal.
In 2011, he founded The Vital Word and, as chief editorial officer, has helped find the right words for an array of nonprofit, corporate and individual clients. In addition to his duties at KCMetropolis, his words can also be seen — and heard — via the local and national media outlets to which he regularly contributes, his language-related posts as a founding contributor to Book Riot, and his regular commentary on NPR affiliate KCUR-FM, for which he has received multiple awards from the Kansas City Press Club. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore Sun, the Miami Herald, the Kansas City Star, Humanities and other major magazines and newspapers.
Wishna is known to be working at odd hours and he said he consciously chose the freelance life in order to be flexible and help take care of his two small children with his wife, Dr. Anne Wishna. And yes, he has written plays longer than “The Impressionists.”
“I wrote something last year that was 35 minutes. My dream soon is to write a full-length play.”
‘The Art is a Lie’
Performances of ‘The Art is a Lie,’ featuring Victor Wishna’s short play “The Impressionists,” will take place July 17 through 25 at Phosphor Studio, 1730 Broadway in Kansas City, Missouri. Tickets are $10 each along with a Fringe button, which can be purchased for a one-time $5 charge and is needed for admittance at any 2015 Fringe event. The running time is approximately 60 minutes.
Performance times:
Friday, July 17, at 10:30 p.m.
Monday, July 20, at 6 p.m.
Wednesday, July 22, at 7:30 p.m.
Friday, July 24, at 9 p.m.
Saturday, July 25, at 3 p.m.
For more information and to purchase tickets, visit kcfringe.org/art-lie.{/mprestriction}
