The Blackbox Theater is a classroom by day, a relatively small and plain space, but during the Berkeley High School One Acts Festival in the first two weeks of March, it transformed innumerable times. Double rows of seats formed a U-shape across three of the walls, giving each audience member a unique and intimate perspective on the acts.<\/p>\n
The show opened with Jonathan Rand\u2019s \u201cCheck, Please\u201d directed by BHS senior Jay Trauner. The play followed two protagonists as they each suffered through a series of awful dates, from a girl who is afraid of practically everything, to a small child who somehow found his way onto a dating app. The supporting actors displayed incredible versatility, each playing around three different characters, each of whom in turn created a uniquely uncomfortable dinner date for the main characters.<\/p>\n
\u201cCheck, Please\u201d was followed by Director of the Neo-Futurists Greg Allen\u2019s \u201cToo Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind,\u201d an interactive show composed of 25 possible plays (shortened from 30 for this particular performance.) The actors attempted to perform as many as they could in 20 minutes (once again shortened from the original 60), plucking the play-numbers from a clothesline running from wall to wall.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On Friday\u2019s show, one particularly memorable short play contained the pieing of the show\u2019s director, BHS senior Nevo Naftalin-Kelman. BHS junior Inyo Harmon, an actor in the play, explained that this was the result of an off-stage bet Naftalin-Kelman made with his cast to help them bond.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cToo Much Light\u201d involved the audience more than any other act, with members being pulled from the crowd to get sprayed with a water gun or being addressed directly by the performers. Harmon said, \u201cI feel like our minimalist, breaking-the-fourth-wall, meta play fit the (one act) format really well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Next came \u201cThe Day the Music Came Back,\u201d written by award-winning playwright Alvaro Saar Rios and directed by BHS junior Hannah Jean Bardeen. The show takes place in a future society where music has been banned for over 100 years. The main characters meet covertly to share their grandparents\u2019 stories about music in the past \u2014 the show opens with a reverent second-hand description of Selena. When a member of the group discovers what they call a \u201cmusic-player,\u201d which looked to be a 2000s iPod, they risk their safety to hear music for the first time. Bardeen said, \u201cThe first two plays are comedies and strange, short sketches, and then the last two are both student-written pieces. So mine is nice because it\u2019s one of the more serious plays. It kind of can balance (the festival) out.\u201d<\/p>\n
After the intermission was \u201cEcho and Narcissus,\u201d written and directed by BHS juniors Josie Bylo and Owen Novick-Prucher. The dialogue incorporated colloquial terms while still eloquently telling the Greek myth. Using a patchwork of blue and white fabrics as a body of water, they simply created the tale\u2019s setting and allowed the stellar performances and beautiful phrasing of the story to carry the audience\u2019s\u00a0 imagination further. In their director\u2019s program statement, Bylo wrote, \u201cIt was my favorite myth as a kid \u2026 There were no good play versions of this myth that we were able to find, so we decided to write (one).\u201d<\/p>\n
The ending act, BHS junior Felicity Atala\u2019s original musical \u201cEver After,\u201d was by far the longest, coming to about 45 minutes. A dark twist on a few classic fairytales, the show mainly followed Rapunzel, but also reimagined the stories of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty as Rapunzel\u2019s long-lost sisters. While an ambitious feat to pull off in limited time, Atala and her cast impressively managed to incorporate humor, romance, a proper story arc, numerous songs, and even some dancing into their act. Atala invested a huge amount of energy in the show, from composing original songs to writing the script to directing and to providing piano accompaniment onstage. \u201cI\u2019m sharing stuff with a paying audience and that can be kind of nerve-wracking, but I feel like when I get on stage everything will come together,\u201d Atala said.<\/p>\n
The One Acts Festival covered the audience\u2019s emotional range \u2014 one moment laughing, one moment fearful, one moment heavy-hearted \u2014 but ultimately leaves them with a sense of having been invited into a community. This could be the result of the familial themes of acts like \u201cEver After\u201d or audience participation in ones like \u201cToo Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.\u201d Maybe it\u2019s the effect of the wrap-around view of the stage in the theater or the visible joy that was seen on the actors\u2019 faces as they were performing. All in all, the festival stands as a testament to the creativity of its student organizers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Blackbox Theater is a classroom by day, a relatively small and plain space, but during the Berkeley…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":218807,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-218806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218806"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218806\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}