Review of LIKE WHITE ON RICE

J.Wynn Rousuck, Sun Theater Critic, Published on August 17, 1998 © 1998- The Baltimore Sun

Only one of the three one-act comedies being presented at the Spotlighters is actually about cliches. But in a sense, they all are, since each puts a new spin on a cliched situation. The tone for this trio of Baltimore Playwrights Festival offerings is set by the opener, Mark Scharf’s clever 10-minute sketch, Like White on Rice, which is written entirely in cliches. Ten minutes of cliches might not seem to amount to much. But Scharf’s singular achievement is that, using everything from worn-out pick-up lines (“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”) to threadbare quotations from sources as wide-ranging as Alcoholics Anonymous and Shakespeare, he succeeds in establishing a fleeting romantic triangle between a young woman (Cindy Spearman) in a bar and the two men (C. Dan Bursi and Jerry Gietka) who are competing to pick her up.