aliveplayone In 2008 Alive Theatre set sail on its journey of itinerant theatre-making with its new-play festival. Four years later, Alive Theatre is still kicking, kicking off Season No. 4 with—what do you know?—Festival No. 4. See how that works?

But how does this work, this new-play-festival thingy? It’s non-traditional, but none too complicated: never-before-seen plays—this year, all by authors from Los Angeles and Orange Counties—get their first shots at an audience. Show up, and you’re part of the process.

That’s exactly what Alive Theatre is hoping for its Long Beach Poppin’ Play Festival.

The process in action, Session 1 of 3 (Friday night):

Headlights and Bush by Aaron Van Geem (Dir. Eamonn Fox)

Something is wrong with Richie (Van Geem). He is not dealing at all well with the everyday stresses of society, such as fellow motorists flashing their headlights at you know yours are off. But a misguided foray into the world of weaponry means Richie’s got to get out of town, out into the wilderness. And you know what? Maybe Richie will like it better there.

Headlights and Bush fits in a genre I’ll call “sitcom absurdism,” the absurdity intentionally lacking in any of the brooding symbolism and substance of Beckett and Ionesco and being played simply for laughs—yet while still giving us characters and a story we can follow, sans difficulty. I don’t know that we care about any of Van Geem’s characters, but we can’t help but like them. And they do make us laugh.

It’s probably out in the woods where the play hits its stride (sort of like Richie, I suppose). There’s some amusing use of humans as non-human entities, including Fox himself, who deserves the All-Time Achievement Award for Awesomeness in an Elementally One-Dimensional Role. No one has ever made me laugh more with less.

The ending may leave a little something to be desired, but that’s what a festival like this is about: firing up your ideas and seeing how they flicker to life in front of an audience.

Garden of Ashes by Jan O’Connor (Dir. Caprice Spencer Rothe)

aliveplaytwo So a gal walks into a repository for the ashes of unidentified decedents…. No, it’s not the set-up for a joke. Rachel (Julie Le) is back in Chicago for a teachers’ conference and has decided to search for signs of what happened to her former grad-school classmate, Joe, with whom she has lost contact and of whom she can find no trace. Is he missing and presumed dead, and might she find confirmation of that here by finding his “cremains?” And why does she seem to yearn so for him to be here, as opposed to simply out there in the world?

O’Connor gives us a plausible answer to that question. And so when Rachel asks Oscar (the director of the repository, played with a quiet OCD dignity by Paul Knox), “What do you have to do to make everyone forget you?” we understand the question to be about the would-be forgetters as much as it is about the would-be forgotten.

What O’Connor doesn’t quite do is pull all the details in the writing together. Perhaps we can chalk it up to Oscar’s absentmindedness that he labeled 1989 as “probably before you [i.e., Rachel] were born,” even though five minutes earlier she finished telling him she’s got a Master’s degree in English and has been a teacher for four years. But it makes no sense for the cremains labels of unidentified decedents to say things as specific like “Age: 59,” nor for a superfluous piece of video supposedly of Rachel’s and Oscar’s hands as they check a cremains register to feature limbs costumed so differently than Le and Knox that all we are is puzzled.

Garden of Ashes is going for something to do with we humans spending our energies on life—and on those who want to live—rather than that which does not. There’s a seed of that here, but it has some growing to do.

La Reve Collectif, based on a story by Robert Edward (Dir. Kate Bowen) aliveplaythree

Glen (Ivan Rodriguez) finds himself in a dream that seems like it might be more—a feeling confirmed when the television in front of which he has fallen asleep begins reporting a strange phenomenon: all over the world people are falling asleep and into a collective dreamspace.

How are they verifying this so quickly, mere hours after the phenomenon has begun to exert itself, let alone get word out to the worldwide media? Edward never addresses that problem. But maybe it’s part of la rêve collectif? Well, let that go. After all, as Ivan (I think) speculates, “Maybe [what's happening] it’s the walls that keep us from thinking at each other are getting softer.”

To whom does he speculate? Larry (Yonathan Zeray), the first of a once-tight group of friends with whom he reunites in this collective dreamspace. The others are ex-girlfriend Iris (Cassie Vail Yeager) and Sam (Jeanette Deutsch).

Some of the ground traversed by La Reve Collectif has been covered in Richard Linklater’s brilliant Waking Life, including that much of what Edward gives us is the characters talking about their ongoing experience. But La Reve Collectif communicates nowhere near that variety and breadth of insight, even when it covers similar ideas. Rather, La Reve Collectif describes a small orbit around a quasi-Burning Man idea that perhaps group consciousness is within our grasp—and while we’re here, let’s go out on this dream playa and check out all the cool stuff we can manifest.

In its current state, La Reve Collectif may be too long by half, as there is a good deal of redundancy in the dialog and even in the dream elements our foursome encounters. Getting toward the end of the play we begin to explore Ivan’s personality and why the foursome—particularly he and Iris—are no longer together, but the vagueness around this issue (Ivan’s a dour philosophical sad sack, but why?) keeps it from being as interesting as it might.

But if you’re someone who partakes in psychoactive substances, there may be much to enjoy here. There are pretty colors, glowing swingy things, good-natured silliness, plenty of spaces to trip on the stasis, and a fuzziness to the philosophizing that might play well if you’re just letting it roll over you.

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In their mission statement, Alive Theatre say they strive “to act as a gateway through which audiences will explore the creative movement taking place in their very own neighborhoods.” That’s exactly what you get here: a passageway into original theatre as it is being created in your town. It’s not necessarily finished, but its heart is beating. Here’s your chance to put your finger on the pulse.

LONG BEACH POPPIN’ PLAY FESTIVAL ALIVE THEATRE • THE DOME ROOM @ THE LAFAYETTE: 528 E BROADWAY AVE • LONG BEACH 90802 • 552.818.7364 ALIVETHEATRE.ORG • FRI 8PM, SAT 6PM & 9PM • $18; $15 FOR STUDENTS. GROUP AND MULTI-NIGHT PACKAGE DEALS AVAILABLE • THROUGH NOV 19