Tag Archives: Jeffrey Bassett

Actors revisit ‘The Foreigner,’ with comic results

When the comic farce “The Foreigner” opened on June 5 at Bremerton Community Theatre, several of the show’s cast members were revisiting a play — and even specific roles — with which they had a history.

Steven Buechler, very funny as the lead character, Charlie, played the same role at BCT circa 1990. Castmate Mike Klemetsrud also was in that 1990 cast, as Charlie’s friend Froggy. This time out, he plays the menacing Georgia redneck Owen.

Like Buechler, Katrina Baxter Hodiak also has played her character — backwoods lodgekeeper Betty — before, but not at BCT. She played the role in a 2011 production at Paradise Theatre in Gig Harbor. (For you extremely detail-oriented people, Gary Fetterplace, who played Froggy in the Paradise production, was working hospitality in the BCT lobby; he’s preparing for the Bainbridge Performing Arts Shakespeare Society‘s upcoming run of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Bloedel Reserve this summer).

Our review of the opening-night performance of “The Foreigner” is here:

http://www.kitsapsun.com/entertainment/theater-bcts-funny-foreigner-is-comedy-with-characters_86997346

— MM

‘Summerplay’ 2012 will feature a half dozen new one-acts

First-time directors, a first-time playwright and several returning favorites mark the 10th edition of Changing Scene Theatre Northwest‘s “Summerplay” festival of new one-acts plays, the line-up for which recently appeared on the company’s Web site (changingscenenorthwest.org).

The capper of the festival’s first decade will be presented Aug. 31 to Sept. 9 at the Bremerton Eagles Aerie 192, 205 Sixth St., according to Changing Scene artistic director Pavlina Morris. Friday and Saturday performances will be at 7:30 p.m., with Sunday matinees at 2 p.m.

Playwrights John C. Davenport, Scott Gibson and Josh Hartwell, all of whom have extensive histories with the Bremerton troupe — who have been celebrating summer by producing evenings of original short stage works from around the country since their inception. At the same time, Darren Hembd, one of Changing Scene’s longest-tenured members as an actor, director and technician, takes the play-writing plunge with a show titled “The Playwright.”

Morris has doled out two of the plays each to two first-time directors, Jeffrey Bassett and Dray Young, and Samantha Camp, who’ll be making her Changing Scene debut. Bassett, one of the area’s busiest actors, just completed a tour-de-force run as Arnold Beckoff in Changing Scene’s production of “Torch Song Trilogy.” Young, another “Torch Song” veteran, is a CSTN regular. And Camp has worked on stages in Tacoma, Gig Harbor and Port Orchard, notably Western Washington Center for the Arts’ production of “Hot L Baltimore.”

Bassett will direct Davenport’s “Collector’s Edition” and “Airport Diner,” by Californian Carol Roper. Another California writer, Stanley Toledo, contributed “Introductions,” to be directed by Camp, who’ll also helm Gibson’s “Professional Eye-Opener.” Young gets the director’s chair for Hembd’s debut piece, as well as Hartwell’s “The Extraordinarily Mundane Adventures of Earth Boy.”

Seattleite Davenport and Colorado-based Gibson and Hartwell make up a sort of all-star team of providers of original material to the Bremerton-based fringe company, which is an offshoot of the original Changing Scene Theatre in Denver. Among them, they’ve had five full-length plays and a festival full of one-acts produced in Bremerton.

Another franchise player in the “Summerplay” pantheon, L.A. playwright Mark Harvey Levine, is notably absent from this year’s lineup. But Morris has hinted that an evening of selected Levine one-acts might be in the offing in the near future.