On Friday, Mer and I met up with Brandon and Jen at Actors’ Summit theater. Actors’ Summit was putting on new play, A Girl’s Guide to Coffee, by a Cleveland playwright named Eric Coble. We were not quite sure what to expect – my best guess was that it was a comedy.

I was not completely wrong; it had many comedic moments, but it also had several very serious times as well. The play is probably best described as exaggerated real life. The play focuses on a young woman who started working at a coffee shop during college, and she is still there two years after college. She works with her still-in-school roommate, visits her slightly pressuring parents, and deals with a boss who badly wants to send her to compete in the “barrista olympics” in Spain, a plan that the young woman thinks will destroy her art of coffee creations and her quest for the perfect latte.

The play was very solid; I did not love it, nor did I dislike it. It was probably too close to real life, while not being a mirror of real life, to completely capture my attention. Some of the humor was about cell phone etiquette, and I’m not into cell phones, so that passed me by. The play’s more serious moments occasionally felt a little heavy-handed, with lessons-to-be-learned stated explicitly to the audience instead of letting us figure them out. Having said that, the play was enjoyable, and I did appreciate the struggle of a young person trying to figure out how she should fit into things, and trying to juggle multiple relationships (parents, roommate, boss, boyfriend).

The actress playing the young woman did an excellent job. She had magnificent chemistry with her on-stage boyfriend, and she carried more than half the lines in the play. The boyfriend and the boss were both excellent actors, and the other actors did well in smaller roles.

The set may be the most extensive set I have seen in all my years of going to Actors’ Summit. They had created the counter area of a coffee shop at the back of the stage, including all the equipment used in making coffee. The front of the set was made up of sofas that were the front of the shop, or the young woman’s apartment, or her parents’ house, or wherever else was needed. It worked well.

So, it was a solid play, and it was fun to see a new work with Brandon (CVCA’s theater teacher) and Jen. We decided to extend the evening after the play, and we headed over to Friday’s for dessert, where we got a chance to catch up, especially with Jen, whom we don’t see so often as we see Brandon.