playbill vip

NOTES FROM THE DIRECTOR

I spent my young life, from the age of 8 until the age of 20, participating in community theatre.  While many people laugh at the sterotypes associated with amateur actors in less than state-of-the-art "theaters" borrowing furniture, costume shopping in people's closets, and a bunch of dads painting and building the sets on the weekends (with their own tools, thank you very much) like a bunch of Tim Taylor Home Improvement posturing, the word community means a lot.

It was in these theaters that I learned stage directions, how to rehearse and take direction, don't touch the props, no you can't use the drill-you're 8, tech rehearsals are really long, I can get my homework done anywhere, and how to be a part of a team.

These are ALL skills that I used as a professional performer, and I still use today as a theatre educator. THIS is common core, ladies and gentlemen (except 4th grade common core math...I still don't get it.)

This show is about that.  It's about building your set with what you have.  It's about borrowing furniture that doesn't necessarily match-but that's ok. It's about bad wigs and sometimes really cool costumes, and the kid whose parent sits in the back and backseat directs, and the kid whose parent doesn't understand this "theatre stuff."

This show is about making the best of what you have.  From our set, designed to look like it was created by one person who has the love, but not the money or the time, to the script within the play...poor Phyllis seems to be the person who just doesn't "get" this theatre thing...too bad she's the playwright.

This show is often called a "Noises Off rip-off."  However, it was first published in 1980, two years before Noises Off came to rule the play-within-a-play world.  Written by Rick Abbot, the pen name for Jack Sharkey who wrote 83 plays between 1975 and his death in 1992, this play-within-a-play is a perfect peek at the underestimated world of community theatre.  A world where "the show must go on" even if the set isn't finished, the sound doesn't work, the gun is broken, the playwright keeps changing things....

Enjoy the show!

Stacy Castiglione

Los Alamitos Theatre Director

THANK YOU TO OUR CETA ADJUDICATORS