Claudio is currently under arrest in Atlanta for impregnating his fiancée, and although the sex was consensual, he might even face the death penalty.
That’s how it is with live performance. The suspension of belief yields some dire situations, and their absurdity persists only at our discretion. The reality is that Claudio’s one of the main characters in William Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure,” running through April 9 at a smallish niche venue in Atlanta.
But live theater will endure long after Atlanta (or San Diego, for that matter) is gone because live stories fill a fundamental human need. That message wasn’t lost on the Atlanta proprietors when they started mounting plays 15 years ago “” and with 25 centuries of theater as its backdrop, a fledgling San Diego seeks to follow suit at a Point Loma fixture.
Girl Next Year Theatre, itself less than a year in the making, has set up shop at The Hole tavern, 2820 Lytton St., with what it hopes will become a regular slate of original works. It produced its first entry at the venue last January, mounting an anthology of events that helped shape San Diego life in 2005. Plans are under way for a similar show about 2006. Meanwhile, the company is building its base with something called “The Dating Pool,” a reflection on local relationships, which opened March 2 and closes the 17th. The play is taken from a series of interviews edited by Girl Next Year’s Jennie Olson, and the upshot doesn’t always augur well among the hopefuls.
“Unfortunately,” show director and company co-founder Tisha Tumangan said, “I didn’t realize bad dates were such an epidemic. I’ve had people say, ‘Oh, I’ve been on that date.’ But it endears people to the piece when they have that type of familiarity. It’s fun to see people recognize these things and attach themselves to it.”
Fun, yes ” but there is infinitely more at work behind the scenes. Live theater is the repository of events that mold the world, and the most important of those are carried out on the smallest scale. A tavern thus makes an ideal play venue amid its own inconspicuousness, Tumangan said.
“As a theater artist trying to make a living, I have to recognize that there’s a clientele base out there beyond the people going to the traditional theaters. I like the idea of reaching different groups of people and different generations,” she added.
That initiative led Girl Next Year into production of a reader’s theater piece in 2005, one that ideally helped narrow an intergenerational split.
“In our culture. There’s not a big connection between senior citizens and teenagers,” she said. “I was fortunate enough to grow up with grandparents on both sides of my family. It makes me so sad to see kids that are almost afraid to talk with older people, or vice versa. There’s not a lot of reaching out there.”
What followed was an entry called “Faith,” an exchange about sectarian beliefs culled from interviews with both generations and performed at a Lemon Grove church.
“More than the work, it was definitely about the process, to get them to work together and be comfortable with each other,” Tumangan said. “Doing theater not only about the community but to benefit the community is really important for us.”
Tumangan, 31, holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from University of California, San Diego’s Department of Theatre and Dance. Her school connections, she said, aided in the formation of Girl Next Year; six company members attended UCSD as well.
Ideally, Tumangan said, campus exposure will fuel the politically oriented material to which Girl Next Year aspires. Meanwhile, The Hole’s 55-seat, open-air space has assumed a place as window to the world. And as long as Claudio behaves himself, he’s welcome anytime.
Starting in April, The Hole is open seven days a week. It offers meeting space for community and special event groups. Further information about The Hole or Girl Next Year is available at (619) 446-6753. Admission to “The Dating Pool” involves a $10 donation.