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.
The show opened with Jonathan Rand’s “Check, Please” 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.
“Check, Please” was followed by Director of the Neo-Futurists Greg Allen’s “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind,” 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.
On Friday’s show, one particularly memorable short play contained the pieing of the show’s 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.
“Too Much Light” 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, “I feel like our minimalist, breaking-the-fourth-wall, meta play fit the (one act) format really well.”
Next came “The Day the Music Came Back,” 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’ stories about music in the past — the show opens with a reverent second-hand description of Selena. When a member of the group discovers what they call a “music-player,” which looked to be a 2000s iPod, they risk their safety to hear music for the first time. Bardeen said, “The 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’s one of the more serious plays. It kind of can balance (the festival) out.”
After the intermission was “Echo and Narcissus,” 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’s setting and allowed the stellar performances and beautiful phrasing of the story to carry the audience’s imagination further. In their director’s program statement, Bylo wrote, “It was my favorite myth as a kid … There were no good play versions of this myth that we were able to find, so we decided to write (one).”
The ending act, BHS junior Felicity Atala’s original musical “Ever After,” 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’s 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. “I’m 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,” Atala said.
The One Acts Festival covered the audience’s emotional range — one moment laughing, one moment fearful, one moment heavy-hearted — 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 “Ever After” or audience participation in ones like “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.” Maybe it’s the effect of the wrap-around view of the stage in the theater or the visible joy that was seen on the actors’ faces as they were performing. All in all, the festival stands as a testament to the creativity of its student organizers.