OCC announces ambitious season

Orange Coast College boasts one of the most active theater

departments of any community college operation, and next season the

Costa Mesa college will stage no fewer than 11 new productions --

matching, numerically, the output of South Coast Repertory each

season.

Following the upcoming project, “The Family Melodrama, Vaudeville

and Ice Cream Social,” which runs from July 7 to 10 and 14 to 17, the

drama department will turn its attention to the new season, which

gets underway in September.

Leading off the 2005-06 schedule will be Neil Simon’s bittersweet

comedy “I Ought to Be in Pictures,” centering on a failed Hollywood

screenwriter and his long-estranged daughter who shows up on his

doorstep. A project of the college’s Repertory Theater Company,

“Pictures” will play from Sept. 9 to 18 in the Drama Lab Studio,

marking the opening of the company’s 21st season of productions.

The Repertory will be back from Sept. 30 to Oct. 2 with “Solo

Voices,” a variety of original and published monologues chosen by

members of the acting company. This popular exercise in individual

showmanship has become an annual event.

“A Patch of Earth,” a drama by award-winning National Public Radio

reporter and playwright Kitty Felde, is ticketed for a brief

engagement from Oct. 19 to 23 in OCC’s Robert B. Moore Theatre. The

play is based on the real-life trials of a young Bosnian soldier

caught in the middle of his country’s civil war.

As the holidays approach, the college breaks out the ice cream,

cookies, punch -- and melodrama. The annual “Old-Fashioned Christmas

Melodrama and Ice Cream Social” will be staged by the Repertory for

two weekends, Dec. 9 to 11 and 16 to 18, in the Drama Lab Theater,

offering free ice cream at intermission and a visit from jolly old

St. Nick.

The Repertory will turn its attention to some lesser-known short

works by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lanford Wilson for two

weekends in February in the Studio Theater. The selected one-acts,

under the collective title “Voices of American Theater: Lanford

Wilson,” will be staged Feb. 10 to 12 and 17 to 19.

Another showcase for a leading American playwright will play for

one weekend, March 3 to 5, when the college presents “Voices of

American Theater: John Patrick Shanley.” Shanley is the author of

such plays as “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” and “Women of Manhattan.”

Dostoevsky’s classic novel, “The Brothers Karamazov,” comes to the

Drama Lab stage March 16 to 26. This epic work about family, rivalry,

love and faith will be directed by David Scaglione, who adapted

another lengthy tome, “Moby Dick,” for production last season.