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PLAYER'S STUFF
BOX OFFICE IN THE NEWS
CASTING
CALL FOR OUR SPRING
SHOW!
Tuesday, January 10,
2012
Wednesday, January 11,
2012
8pm each evening at the
Radburn Grange (stage door)
A night of comedy,
love stories and general bliss.
ALL IN THE TIMING by
David Ives
and
DO OVER by Frederick
Stroppel
Directed by Michael J. Sheehan, Jr.
Sides
will be provided. Performance dates are
April 27,28, 29 and May
3,4,5
Rehearsals will be Tuesday and Wednesday nights
at 8pm, and once the show gets closer Thursday night will be added
in.
Synopsis
David
Ives' All in the Timing is a paradoxical comedy comprising of six
acts.
The
first selection is entitled Sure Thing. It is a
chronicle of the possibilities that exist when two people try to
have a cup of coffee together. It starts with the question "is
that seat taken?" with responses starting with "yes, I'm waiting
for someone" to "no, have a seat." It takes a few moments to
become comfortable with the switching of scenes but it is eerily
mesmerizing to watch the scene unfold and recognize that you
yourself have been in that exact position.
The second
selection, Trotsky, is about Leon Trotsky. He has
a mountain climber's axe smashed/buried into his skull by his
communist gardener, Ramon, the day before, yet he remembers
nothing. His ice pick phobia is the focus of this act, but it is
the mountain climber's axe that does him in. The weird part (yes,
something weirder that an ice pick fetish) is that his wife comes
in the room with an encyclopedia from the 1990s (the play is set
in 1940s) to inform him that the book says he is going to die
today.
The third selection, Philadelphia,
takes place in a coffee shop where the various inhabitants are
stuck in different "cities" or states of mind. The person in a Los
Angeles is perpetually carefree and doesn't get upset that his
wife left him, or that he just lost his job. The person in a
Chicago feels worse than dead, and the person in a Philadelphia
gets exactly the opposite of what he asks for. The person in the
Los Angeles explains everthing to the person in the Philadelphia
so he finally learns to ask for the opposite of what he wants.
Unfortunately, the person in the Los Angeles gets sucked into the
other person's Philadelphia and he finally feels the pain of
losing his job and wife.
The fourth selection is called
Words, Words, Words. It is a bizarre look into
the lives of three monkeys who are chosen for an experiment with
the following premise: If a monkey type long enough at a
typewriter, it will eventually come up with Hamlet. The lesson
here is one of objectification: the monkeys are forced to do what
their captors order them to do. The actors present their futile
fate to the audience well.
The fifth is called The
Universal Language. It involves a shyster who makes
up a "language" and then offers to teach it to people (passing it
off as "The Universal Language") for a rather large sum of money.
He claims that it will catch on like wildfire and soon everyone
will be speaking it. His first pupil is a shy, stuttering girl
with little money who hopes that this new language will help her
overcome her speech problems and let her meet people. The teacher
speaks in this "new" language for a good part of the scene so it
is kind of hard to understand him, but in the end the two of them
fall in love with each other and all's well.
In Do
Over, as a young lady is preparing for a date, she
discovers a young mans on her living room floor -- frightening her
half to death! The man turns out to be her date, but he's twenty
minutes early, and how did he get in, anyway? The truth comes out:
he's not really in the apartment at all; he's miles and years
away. He has appeared from the future to ask her not to keep their
date, knowing that their love affair will not work out. The woman
disbelieves him but he tells her things that would otherwise be
impossible for him to know. A contemporary love story with a
marvelous
twist.
Character
Breakdown:
*(Actors WILL be
double cast)
Sure
Thing
Bill:
Male; 20’s -30’s; unassuming, average nice-guy.
Betty: Female,
20’s-30’s; pleasant, confident.
Both actors undergo wildly
variant character transformations
as the scene
progresses.
Words, Words,
Words
Milton: Male monkey; not age
specific; the intellectual.
Swift: Male monkey; not age
specific; the rabble rousing
proletarian.
Kafka: Female
monkey; not age specific; the sensible one.
Actors are not
costumed in monkey suits.
Variations on the
Death of Trotsky
Trotsky: Male; must
play 55-60; energetic revolutionary.
Mrs. Trotsky: Female; must
play 55-60; matronly.
Ramon: Male: 30’s-40’s; pleasant; Mexican
accent.
The Universal
Language
Don: Male; 30’s- 50’s; The
tutor; very eccentric; actor must
be able to memorize nonsense
language and employ physical
gestures to communicate.
Dawn:
Female; 20’s-40’s; self-conscious woman with stutter
who
enrolls in class in Unamunda. Actor must be good
listener.
Breaks out of her shell by the end.
The
Philadelphia
Al: Male; 30’s; slick, very
“Hollywood”.
Waitress: Female; 20’s-30’s; frank;
straightforward.
Mark: Male; 30’s; high
strung.
Do Over:
1M, 1F age is flexible.
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