Last Monday, a film programmer for Sundance named Emily Doe came to CSUMB’s Cinematic Arts & Technology department and showed shorts from the 2013 festival, including five award winners.
This Thursday, at 7:30pm, Carl Cherry Center hosts Stories on Stage: Canine Encounters, readings by local actors of stories about dogs by T.C. Boyle, Steve Martin, Simon Rich and others.
Independent of that and each other, Monterey Peninsula College Theatre Company and Hartnell College’s Western Stage start up short theater programs at about the same time. No, it’s not National Short Stories Month. That’s next month.
It’s just a serendipitous bonanza of works that try to engage as quickly as possible, one after another. The two theater companies’ offerings warrant special attention:
MPC’s Heaven and Hell on Earth – A One Act Festival is comprised of short contemporary pieces arranged like a conceptual double album. The concept: the things that make life for humans either heavenly or hellish. The plays swing from one to the other.
Director Sam Fife, who has acted for PacRep and Stardust Playhouse and is a descendent of Louisa May Alcott (Little Women), gleaned many of the dozen pieces from the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Ky.
He hadn’t seen any of them performed. Instead he read the plays, some of which contained suggested direction, but Heaven and Hell is mostly Fife’s vision, carried out by a cast of 17 in a two-part, three-hour program of one-acts. One of the longer works, Tracks – 40 minutes long and written by high school science teacher and playwright Peter Tarsi – takes place on a subway, so Fife brought the other plays into that setting.
An apocalyptic story bookends the program. That theme comes from Quake, written by Melanie Marnich, about a woman named Lucy on a metaphysical journey to find her one true love, guided by a woman who is an astrophysicist and a serial killer. Theme music plays a role: Songs come from the Beatles, “Highway to Hell” by AC/DC, “Demons” by Imagine Dragons, “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin. The show is being billed for high school age and older due to language and content, and the line-up changes some – three plays alternate each every other night.
One play, Nightswim, by Julia Jordan, is a spoken duet by two 17-year-old girls who are best friends and accomplices, as poignant and wistful and delicate as REM’s “Nightswimming” but with an undercurrent of danger. There are a lot of stories in store, assembled like an anthology of highly evolved playwrights pushing the genre forward. And if one work isn’t cutting it, another one comes along pretty soon. That sounds pretty heavenly.
Hartnell College’s Western Stage second anniversary Playwright’s Festival is made up of three days of readings of excerpts of longer original works – about three pieces each performance – by alumni, many of whom are coming to the festival to celebrate the theater company’s 40th anniversary.
The excerpts were chosen by the playwrights to exemplify an iconic work in their portfolio. (Due to mature content, it’s recommended for high school juniors or older.) Artistic Program Director, Melissa Chin Paker, coordinated the works, with help from actor (and, here, playwright) Jeffrey T. Heyer, according to length and diversity of emotional weight, as well as the availability of the playwright to attend.
Many have been involved since the 1980s; Heyer and Harvey Landa are staff members. The others were actors or writers who’ve since moved on.
Mike Roddy’s piece, Looking for Words, about his mother’s struggles with Alzheimer’s, opens the festival. But although he’s local, he won’t be able to attend because he’ll be running his 4th Annual High School Film Festival at the Salinas Performing Arts Center (more shorts!). Heyer adapted part of Bram Stoker’s Dracula into Dracula, The Dark King, bringing out “Stoker’s buried psychological themes… hovering tantalizingly just below the surface.” He will be there.
Playwrights are coming in from Seattle and San Francisco. David Norum is coming from South Monterey County; he has a piece called Mozambique that’s about a dysfunctional suburban family in the “fictional” Cypress County, California.
“This [festival] was built around distilling Western Stage’s uniqueness,” Parker says. “That’s why we [have] musical theater, new works and adaptation.”
Each reading will be preceded by a talk by attending playwrights; after the readings, the playwrights, directors and performers will stick around to chat with theater goers. In addition to this weekend’s free festival being devoted to Western Stage-trained playwrights, it’s also a showcase of its directors and actors. So it’s very much a family affair.
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