Carmel Community Players brings back 1970s for two weekends
By STU CLAMPITT
news@readthereporter.com
Carmel Community Players’ (CCP) current production will take you out West, all the way to California in the 1970s. True West stages April 21 to 30 at the Ivy Tech Auditorium, 300 N. 17th St., Noblesville.
According to CCP Director Eric Bryant, True West is about a drifter and a screenwriter who are collaborating on a screenplay in their mother’s southern California home.
“It’s a play that I’ve always enjoyed reading and I’ve seen a couple productions of it,” Bryant told The Reporter. “The thing that really intrigues me about it is that it’s about two brothers who are both in really desperate situations. They’re very different. One is a burgeoning screenwriter. The other is sort of a desert-dwelling petty thief drifter. They’ve both become really dissatisfied with their lives and are desperate to make a change, but at the same time feel very trapped by the lives that they have. There’s something about that story that really appeals to me.”
CCP is billing it as a savage and blackly humorous version of the Cain and Abel story which also satirizes the modern West’s exploitation of the romanticized cowboys-and-Indians West of American mythology.
“It’s a dark comedy,” Bryant said. “It’s very funny. The relationship between the brothers is – as they like to say – they put the fun in dysfunctional.”
There are only four people in the cast.
“The two brothers are pretty much on stage the entire time,” Bryant said. “There’s a Hollywood agent/producer named Saul who comes in for a couple of scenes, and at the end of the show the mom, whose house these two brothers are in, returns from a trip to Alaska.”
With such a small cast, and especially when two characters are carrying bulk of the narrative the whole time, finding the perfect actors was not as easy process.
“We had some really good actors turn out and it made the casting decision pretty difficult,” Bryant said. “The two guys I cast are both actors whose work I know. I’ve worked with both of them before in a different capacity – as an actor – so I know their work, I know their work ethic and they had the right chemistry I was looking for.”
Having found the prefect people to play the dysfunctional brothers, CCP is ready to transport audiences to a 1970s California kitchen to tell their tale. Go to CarmelPlayers.org/tickets or call (317) 815-9387 for tickets.