The City College Theater Group previews its new production of Alan Ayckbourne‘s time-travel thriller, Communicating Doors (1994), directed by Katie Laris, at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, Feb. 28 and March 1.
The play, with George Coe, Leslie Gangl Howe, Felicia Hall, Brittany Harter, Matt Smith, Julia Trites and Raymond Wallenthin, opens officially March 2 and runs through March 17, in the Garvin Theatre.
The action of Communicating Doors is fairly straightforward, once you accept time travel as a given. In the words of the official Alan Ayckbourne website:
“Set in a near dystopian future, a dominatrix flees for her life through a hotel communicating door only to find herself 20 years in the past. Stalked by a psychopath in the present and the past, the opportunity to alter time for the better puts the lives of three women at stake.”
Ayckbourne began as a poet of suburban anxiety and its whiny nephew, insecurity. Adultery is a constant in this world, with multiple, overlapping adulteries not uncommon.
Money worries, sometimes temporarily banished, also make regular appearances. Self-delusion also plays an important part in the establishment of his characters.
Communicating Doors introduces a new and disturbing element of paranoia into the mix, and the working girl heroine pursued through time by a dangerous nutcase. There are still plenty of laughs, however.
What a friend once said of Billy Wilder might be applied to Ayckbourne with some force: “He sees the worst in everybody. and he sees it funny.”
Yet Ayckbourne’s not a scold, does not sit in judgment (“No, Sir,” says the host of the Monty Python game show, Blackmail, “We don’t morally censure you — we just want the money.”)
No playwright could last as long as Ayckbourne, nor have as many hit plays, by consistently bumming his audiences out. It’s a fun-house mirror he holds up to us, but we are meant to recognize, and forgive, ourselves.
Communicating Doors shows at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, and at 2 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $18 general, $15 seniors and $10 students. Thursday evening and Sunday matinees are $24 general, $19 seniors, $14 students.
The Garvin Theatre is on the West Campus of Santa Barbara City College in the 900 block of Cliff Drive. Parking is free and near the theater.
For information or reservations, call the Garvin box office, 965-5935, or buy tickets online at www.theatregroupsbcc.com.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.