Theater festival contains three plays in one session

By Shari Kaplan

With the coming of spring comes the West Valley College Spring One-Act Festival, which this year is made up of three short plays skillfully packed into one entertaining evening. Performed in the college's newly renovated Chamber Theatre from March 19 to March 28, the plays use as actors students pursuing a degree as well as members of the community--of all ages--who simply enrolled in this one class in order to be in a theatrical performance.

Comedy 101, written and directed by West Valley instructor Jim Callner, starts the evening with a lesson in comedy. Presented in the form of a humorous mock class, Comedy 101 follows an uptight professor as he tries to teach a comedy lab class to his students, who in this case are the actual audience. He also has some less-than-serious teaching assistants.

"The professor is the stereotype of the most pompous, academic-minded teacher in the universe--the type we've all had at some time. Of course, his teaching assistants are the complete opposite of him," laughs Callner, who teaches screenwriting for film and TV.

"It's a pretty vaudevillian and off-the-wall play. It takes a very conservative and controlling character and turns him into a comic figure himself. It doesn't have any bigger message than just to get a life!" adds Callner, who says he wrote Comedy 101 a few years ago, at a point when his life had gotten so serious that he "just had to write a comedy." This is the abridged version of his play; the full-length version will probably be performed at West Valley this fall or winter, he says.

Broadcast: Murder! was written by Leslie Newport and directed by West Valley's own acting instructor Bruce DeLesDernier. DeLesDernier is also the founder of the Festival Theatre Ensemble, which in recent years has performed Shakespeare and other plays in Saratoga's Wildwood Park and other venues. Broadcast: Murder! takes its audience back to the 1940s age of radio, as station WMAC broadcasts a murder mystery while another suspicious mystery begins to unravel off the air.

Written by Christopher Durang and directed by West Valley instructor Amy Zsadanyi-Yale, The Actor's Nightmare proffers the following question: "Imagine stepping onstage without a clue as to what play is being performed or what [the] lines are." The audience follows protagonist George Spelvin as his worst nightmare comes to life in an impromptu, hilarious way.

The West Valley College campus is at 14000 Fruitvale Ave. Tickets are sold at the door and are $8 for adults, $6 for students and seniors. Some material may not be appropriate for young children. For show times and dates, call 741-2058.

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