Millennial madness

Alex Coolman

Idea for a play: an entire society is gripped by the irrational fear that

on a certain, arbitrary date -- say, New Year’s Day -- global disaster is

bound to erupt.

It almost sounds too crazy to believe. But it’s a story that has gripped

the imagination of American society, and now OCC’s Repertory Theatre

Company has taken the logical step of bringing the millennial hobgoblin

to the stage.

“Y2K,” a program of five short plays addressing the coming of the year

2000, opens tonight at OCC’s Drama Lab Studio. The works tackle the

subject with an offbeat and often comic sensibility, said Cynthia Corley,

faculty advisor to the program, suggesting that even if millennial

anxiety isn’t good for anything else, it can be a rich wellspring for

humor.

Titles of the plays include “Nobody Likes Me,” which deals with

relationships at the turn of the century and “Nine Minutes to Midnight,”

which looks at the final moments in what Corley suggests might best be

understood as an alternate dimension.

“It’s kind of like, ‘Where are we?”’ Corley said of the play. “The

calendar on the wall says December 31, 1999, but you wonder if you’re

still on earth by the end.”

The plays’ subjects are sometimes as much about turn-of-the-century

culture as they are about the events of New Year’s Eve.

“Theater Serial Killer Strikes Again!” tells the story, as Corley put it,

“of annoying people in movie theaters and what happens to them.”

Specifically, they are killed by a roving murderer. “The premise is that

the guy who’s killing people in the theaters is trying to rid the world

of disgusting people for Y2K,” Corley said.

That the murderer considers his selection method justifiable serves as a

dark comment on the violence of the late 20th century, Corley said.

“It’s just kind of the way life is now,” she said. “It shows how far

we’ve come, or not come.”

Costa Mesa resident and second-year OCC theater student Sherrie Stone

wrote and is directing a work called “There’s Nothing New Under The Sun.”

The comic play skewers Y2K hysteria by looking at an earlier event in the

history of human anxiety: Y1K.

The coming of the year 1000, in Stone’s dramatic vision, looks a lot like

ordinary American life, circa 1953. Stone’s actors -- she herself plays

the mother of the story’s dysfunctional nuclear family -- roam around the

stage in primitive costumes that are meant to evoke the Middle Ages, but

their domestic bickering sounds like a lost episode of “Leave it to

Beaver.”

OCC student Krissy Shaw plays the daughter of the family, who is obsessed

with the coming of the Y1K, an event she is certain will be accompanied

by some sort of apocalypse. She spends the duration of the act attempting

to convince her hopelessly oblivious parents of the drama of their

situation.

Stone’s character, however, is more sanguine.

“You know I don’t believe in that nonsense, dear,” is her response to

Shaw’s predictions of the Antichrist’s imminent arrival.

The biggest concern this cheerful mother feels with regard to the turn of

the millennium is the effect the new date will have on the technology her

husband uses at his job: the man is a stone mason, and will be forced to

begin carving four-digit years.

Stone says a lot of the domestic material in “There’s Nothing ...” is

drawn from her own life. She hadn’t thought much about the material ahead

of time, but it came pouring out when she sat down to write.

All of the works in “Y2K” were originally penned in a playwriting

workshop held at OCC held in spring. They are being directed and staged

entirely by students, with a little supervision from faculty members like

Corley.

Corley said the tremendous amount of freedom given to the students lends

the works of the Repertory Theatre an unpredictable and occasionally very

exciting feeling.

“We like to say we give them enough rope either to hang themselves or to

climb up to the stars,” Corley said.

‘Y2K’

WHAT: A program of five short plays about the millennium

WHERE: OCC’s Drama Lab Studio, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa

WHEN: Today and Sunday and Nov. 6 and 7. Curtain is at 8 p.m. Saturdays,

2 p.m. Sundays and at 7 p.m. Nov. 7.

HOW MUCH: $5 to $6

PHONE: (714) 432-5640