Theater: “Roads & Roles of Comedy” [] Teatro Santa Ana en la Biblioteca

By Fredric Dannen

Until a few years ago, when he closed The Beer Company, his brewery on Ancha de San Antonio, and moved back to his native California, a lot of San Miguel residents only knew Harold Dean James as the proprietor of a local pub. Many of them would have been surprised to learn that James, a tall, deep-voiced African American, is a consummate theater professional who has acted on Broadway and written and directed numerous Off-Broadway plays.

Last year, for example, a collection of six of his short plays, Roads and Roles of Comedy, had a successful run at The Players, on Gramercy Park South in lower Manhattan, a performance space founded in the 19th century by Edwin Booth. The reviews were excellent. New York Theatre Wire, for instance, called the show an evening of “comedy that captures the absurdities and peculiar coincidences of life… Essential actor’s theatre.” Off-Broadway News, meanwhile, wrote: “Diabolical comedy… These six playlets, written in deadpan comedy style, deal with themes of secrecy, charity, the power of art, greed, seduction and afterlife.”

James is bringing his sextet of comic sketches to the Teatro San Ana in the Biblioteca Pública for six performances: October 27 and 28 and November 3 and 4 at 7pm, and October 29 and November 5 at 3pm. Tickets are $15 US dollars for all seats, apart from the closing show on November 5, which is $25.00 but includes an afterparty with drinks and appetizers. Tickets are available at the door, or online by going to Eventbrite.com and searching “Roads and Roles of Comedy.”

Lee Duberman, who directed the San Miguel Playhouse productions of The Roommate and Little Shop of Horrors, is the director of the Santa Ana production of Roads and Roles. For the six shows of six plays, she has lined up six of San Miguel’s best actors: Mick Diener, Desiree Duncan, Richard Fink, Marthe S. Fraser, Gina Giampaoli, and Gene Harvey.

To paraphrase the review in Off-Broadway News, James’s plays are a cross between the absurdist comedies of Israel Horovitz and The Twilight Zone. In “First Watch,” some rural West Virginians on watch for a meteor shower have a too-close encounter with some space aliens instead. In other sketches, the conversation at an everyday setting – a bus stop, a museum, a park bench, a movie theater – starts out normally but ventures into the surreal or absurd. In “The Interview,” a woman interviewing a man for a job peppers him with unlikely questions, such as, “Do you want to kiss me?”
James’s own background – he grew up in a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses and broke from the clan by studying theater – is improbable in itself. A New York Times review of his debut play, X Train, at La Mama in New York City, described his style as “gently surreal,” an apt description of the collection of plays in James’s newest production.