The All For Fun and Fun For All Comedy Festival is making its return to Thomas Haney secondary’s Sightlines Theatre.
Each night of the festival will consist of three one-act plays.
Subterranean Homesick Blues Again is the shortest of the plays and features a group of teenagers on a cave-diving field trip with their school. But they are loud, obnoxious and rude to their guide and ultimately learn the true meaning of karma.
In the next play, Club Mojito, it is the final weekend before university graduation and a group of friends meet up on a rooftop, where they eat hotdogs and discuss their trepidations about life after school.
Both plays are directed by Shelley Evans, fine arts department head at Thomas Haney.
Sundance, the third play in the festival, is the only one with student directors.
Tessa Jackson is the director and Lauren Booth, both Grade 12 students, is the assistant director. This was their first time directing a play.
Sundance, written by M.Z. Ribalow, is a western that challenges the classical stereotypical roles of the western genre.
It was first performed at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York in 1976 and won a Best Play Award at the 1981 Double Image Theatre Festival at St. Clement’s Theatre.
Cowboys and a barkeep play the stereotypical parts in a western saloon when another cowboy comes to town who doesn’t fit the mould and confuses the other characters.
“He doesn’t really have any emotions, in general,” Booth said of the new cowboy.
“He kills another person and he doesn’t have any real emotion towards it,” she added.
“There is not necessarily a moral to it. It is kind of making fun of stereotypes of western killers, of western scenarios,” continued Booth.
“It’s just kind of slapstick.”
The girls learned a lot from directing their first play.
“I learned a lot about blocking and making sure your audience can always see your actors from where they are on stage,” said Jackson.
Booth learned about prompting, having to feed actors their lines when they don’t know them. Or even letting actors improvise and figuring their lines out on their own.
“When they mess up and have to rely on each other,” said Booth.
• The All For Fun and Fun For All One Act Comedy Festival takes place at Sightlines Theatre, Thomas Haney secondary school, 23000 – 116th Ave., Maple Ridge. The festival runs Feb. 1, 2 and 3 at 7 p.m.
– Audience discretion
is advised.
