First off, here are our two winners for the "All in the Timing" ticket giveaway for this weekend: Amy Hance and Kelly Hawthorne. Each wins two tickets. Congrats.
I talked with some of the show's creative team last week and wanted to share some of their answers to give a little more background for people not familiar with the show:
Question: For people who aren't familiar with the Rogue "All in the Timing" productions, fill them in. Are you now presenting the full David Ives script?
Answer: "All In The Timing" is a collection of hilarious short comedies by David Ives, and we are presenting an evening (or afternoon) of our favorites. Think of it as sketch comedy a la "Saturday Night Live", but with an irreverent appreciation of relationships, language, and philosophy rather than politics and pop culture. There are 14 plays in the complete collection, and presenting them all would be too long for a single evening. We selected 8, including 4 we performed at Rogue Festival 2008 and 3 we did at Rogue 2009, plus 1 that is entirely new for us. Each play has humor on all levels as well as light but poignant commentary on the human condition.
Original cast or new actors?
A mix. We have five fine actors who were not in our previous versions: Terry Lewis, Anna Martinez, Luis Ramentas, Gordon Moore and Julie Ann Keller. The returning favorites are M. Justin Red and Suzanne Grazyna as Mr. & Mrs. Trotsky, John Masier as Phillip Glass, Jennifer Hurd-Peterson and Michael J. Peterson each playing multiple parts, Kate McKnight learning the Universal Language, and Lisi Drione alternating with Suzanne Grazyna in "The Sure Thing."
Tell us about the set. I understand it's pretty wild.
The set, designed by Jeff White, built by the cast and crew and painted by Los Angeles artist Katharine Lawrie, has four separate playing spaces to allow quick shifts between the plays and help provide a variety of looks. The set theme is a fanciful play on the title and all the vertical surfaces are covered with 344 unique "clocks." We also included a girder for the three construction workers who talk over lunch on the 50th floor in "Mere Mortals."
Do you think there's an overarching theme that tie these various short plays together?
Ives plays with the related themes of time and language. Each play highlights how time and timing effect our lives but also how timing is often out of our control. In two of the plays -- "Sure Thing" and "Variations on the Death of Trotsky" -- Ives bends time to give the characters a number of chances to get things right, as we all wish we could do on occasion. All of the plays also explore language and communication. The three monkeys trying to type Hamlet in "Words, Words, Words" muse about the process of writing itself; "Universal Language" explores communication through a language of gibberish; the Loudspeaker Voice in "English Made Simple" translates what people are really saying when making small talk; and in "Phillip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread," Ives mixes the timing of music with the timing of language to create an unusual effect.
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