'Same Stage, Different Channels' is a small, long-awaited success.

There was a dead body on the floor of the Indoor Forest Theater in Carmel, which opened its doors for the wide audience on Friday, July 24, for the first time since 2023, as anyone who bought a ticket for the play Same Stage, Different Channels can attest to. (The confirmation email congratulated patrons for choosing A Christmas Carol, advising to wear a face mask at all times). 

The show hasn't started yet and the lights are still on; the audience members are chatting and snacking, insensitive to the cadaver’s glossy pale calves and the beautiful summer evening outside. It’s hard to blame them for missing out on the weather though—it was really a treat to watch a locally-written contemporary play.

A dead body is a strong opening—a provocation, a sign that the play wants to play with the audience, and indeed Same Stage, Different Channels is a mind game.

In it, a string of scenes—a murder mystery with investigators suspecting they might be killers, a sitcom family life ruined by the lack of laugh track, a space ship saga about misogyny—conjure a fragile, painful upside down world, where entertainment and existential dread melt into one, and where an end of a TV series and death serve as synonyms to one another. Stakes are never clear, identities shift and everything lasts only minutes anyway, because someone can always change a channel. 

It’s a world created by Erik Roycraft, a local writer who has been on the board of the Monterey Peninsula Theatre Alliance. The idea started with a single scene and eventually expanded into a full play—a play about TV and TV shows.

While Roycraft admits that in the era of discussions on AI and social media, TV stops playing a decisive role in our imaginations, streaming TV is what most of us do almost daily. In the era of Netflix and Apple TV, a decision to abandon a group of characters somewhere in the travails of episode four just because a new Nordic slow burn just dropped, was never less easy.

It was fun to see recurring faces among the cast, such as Holly Chiswell, whom we know from her work with Controlled Chaos and Soapbox Stageworks, or poet Brian Sheffield, known for his recent work with the local theater group Enchantrix. 

In many ways, Same Stage, Different Channels fulfills the promise of Pac Rep’s Community Voices that launched in late 2025. The play had only three showings, and Circle Theatre at the Founders Theatre wasn't available, forcing the good old Indoor Forest Theater to open its door—it is filling the gap between commercial productions, educational offerings and more classic repertoire.