PORT ANGELES — Video game monsters and suburban dissonance will invade the stage at Peninsula College tonight through Saturday.
Jennifer Haley’s “Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom” will be performed at the Peninsula College’s Little Theater at 1502 E. Lauridsen Blvd., Port Angeles, at 7:30 p.m. today and Saturday, with matinees at 2 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
Admission is $10, with students admitted free with college identification.
The play is set in a suburban subdivision where parents find their teenagers addicted to online horror video games, which are also set in a subdivision with identical houses.
“It is a play that is very topical,” said the play’s director, Peninsula College graduate Andrew Shanks.
“It is a very dark satire on the 1950s suburban nuclear aesthetic and put into a modern context, with technology thrown into the equation,” he said.
Shank said that, though video games are used to tell the story, the play isn’t essentially about them.
Dark satire
“It is about the miscommunication of families, and it is about technology widening the gap between generations, between friends and strangers and the closest family members,” he said.
The message of the play is the reason he selected it for his debut as a director, he said.
“I’m not being a naturalist, saying that we should throw our cell phones in a pile and light them on fire and go live in a log cabin,” he said.
“I just think we should take a step back and see how addicted we are to technology in general and just talk to each other every once in awhile.”
Shanks said he took a risk with the show by staging it differently than any other he has seen: Instead of sitting in the audience chairs, the attendees will be seated onstage with the actors.
“They will be able to hear us breathe, cry, move,” he said.
Shanks said the play contains mature themes and content and is aimed at an adult audience.
The production stars Gwendolynn Barbee-Yow, Quinton Chastain, John Manno, Amy Meyer, Zachery Moorman, Jeremiah Paulsen, Sean Peck-Collier, Colby Thomas, Apryl Weikel and Corinne Wright.
Stage managers are Carolyn and Crystal Keene. Fight choreography was done by Tyson Dailey and original music by Jake Hanna. Costumes were designed by Richard Stephens, who is also an advertising salesman for the Peninsula Daily News.
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Reporter Paige Dickerson can be reached at 360-417-3535 or at paige.dickerson@peninsuladailynews.com.
