Short Play About St. Cecilia to Be Staged at St. Cecilia

Aplay about St. Cecilia for St. Cecilia’s. That’s what playwright Erik Ehn finished last week for Sledgehammer Theatre, which has a new permanent home in St. Cecilia’s (formerly known as the Sixth Avenue Playhouse).

Sledgehammer will present the world premiere of that short play, “Songs for the Bone Orchard,” along with about a half dozen other short plays also from Ehn’s series “The Saint Plays” Aug. 30-Sept. 20. Each play ranges from seven minutes to a half hour.

Ehn is the literary manager of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and has been writing plays about the saints since 1989. He has written 40 plays to date and said in an interview from his Berkeley office that he expects that “I’ll be writing them for the rest of my life.”

With roughly 10,000 saints, he doesn’t expect to run out of inspiration any time soon.

Raised Catholic, Ehn grew up learning about the saints. Now 34, he found that when he wanted to work with myth and folklore to tell stories about “what happens in the human spirit,” as he puts it, the saints’ lives kept coming back to him, providing insights about “surviving in times of distress or finding incredible generosity in hard times.”

“I’ve been interested in stories that take their elaborate turns in forces that are larger than human history. I found myself casting the net very wide, going into Irish folklore and Indian folklore. Then I realized I should cast my bucket where I’m anchored and, having been raised a Catholic, there was enormous access to these tales. I’m not just a tourist in this world; my world view has been formed by them.”

Some of the plays are narratives, some are cast in present day. With St. Cecilia, a patron saint of music, Ehn said he tried to link the story to the St. Cecilia theater building and to Sledgehammer in San Diego in 1992. He did not elaborate how the update would work.

St. Cecilia was a Third Century Roman and patrician woman who, during her wedding to a wealthy pagan, heard the angels sing to her and tell her to remain a virgin and give her life over to service. She converted to Christianity and converted her husband. Together they bought the bodies of plague victims so they could give them decent burials. The Romans killed them both when they discovered their Christianity.

The story has fascinated Ehn for a long time. He said that, when he found out that Sledgehammer’s new space was to be renamed St. Cecilia’s, “It was too good an opportunity to pass up. Since she is a patron saint of music and Sledgehammer has a rock ‘n’ roll sensibility, it seemed like a match made in heaven.”

The San Diego Repertory Theatre will present the world premiere of Latins Anonymous’ second and newest show as part of the company’s 1992-93 season. The popular four-person team hasn’t appeared here since it opened the San Diego Rep’s 1990 season, when its show extended six weeks beyond the original run dates. The group’s premise this time is the “LA LA LA Awards,” short for for the Los Angeles Latins Anonymous Lifetime Achievement Awards.

The San Diego Rep has also postponed “Life’s A Dream,” its new bilingual jazz opera from its 1992-93 schedule.

Specific dates have still not been set for the season, but it is inching closer to final status with these offerings: “Spunk,” George C. Wolfe’s adaptation of tales by Zora Neale Hurston opens mid-October on the Lyceum Stage; “Queen’s Garden,” an autobiographical one-woman show by Brenda Aoki Wong in the Lyceum Space; “A Christmas Carol,” to be directed by San Diego Rep producing director Sam Woodhouse on the Lyceum Stage; the new Latins Anonymous show January on the Lyceum Stage; S. Ansky’s “The Dybbuk,” in February on the Lyceum Space; Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd,” in April and May on the Lyceum Stage; and Eugene Ionesco’s “The Chairs,” at the end of May and in June in the Lyceum Space.

Performance artist Holly Hughes will perform “Snatches,” her first new work since “World Without End,” Aug. 22-23 as the final offering of the Fresh Dish Performance Series at Sushi Performance Gallery.

Amy Shock, a co-founder and co-producer of Fresh Dish, said she substituted “Snatches” for Fresh Dish’s planned season closer, a San Diego revue of local gay and lesbian work, when Hughes called to tell Shock she wanted to try out her latest work-in-progress as part of the Fresh Dish series.

“She came to us because she said she wants a really ‘queer’ audience--that’s exactly how she put it. But I think a lot of other people will be interested in it too,” Shock said.

Shock, an MFA candidate in set design at UC San Diego, first met Hughes when she did set design for “World Without End” in upstate New York five years ago. In the intervening years, Hughes achieved notoriety as one of the “NEA 4”--one of four artists whose funding was revoked by the National Endowment for the Arts.

This is the first work she has created since that time. Even Shock said she doesn’t know what it is about yet.

“But I trust her,” Shock said.

“Snatches” will be presented at 8 p.m. Aug. 22 and at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. Aug. 23 at Sushi, 296-0306. After San Diego, “Snatches” will be presented at Highways in Los Angeles Aug. 28-29.

PROGRAM NOTES: “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a touring Gospel musical by the Rev. David Payton of North Carolina, will be presented July 15-17 at the Spreckels Theatre. The play deals with problems that plague the African-American community, focusing specifically on single parenthood, drug and alcohol abuse, spousal abuse and gangs, and celebrates the importance of religion as part of the solution to those problems. Call 235-0494.

CRITIC’S CHOICE

PASADENA PLAYHOUSE BEGINS POWAY SERIES

The Pasadena Playhouse, which will launch a series of shows at the Poway Center for the Performing Arts in September, will give a preview of coming attractions with the new Richard Maltby Jr.-David Shire musical, “Closer Than Ever,” for four days beginning Tuesday.

The show paints pictures of contemporary middle-aged craziness, contradictions and complications entirely through songs. It was critical and box-office hit in Pasadena; the authors, whose last hit was “Baby,” have described the Pasadena Playhouse production as the “definitive version.”

Performances are 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday at the Poway Center for the Performing Arts in Poway. Tickets are $25. Call 1-800-883-PLAY or Ticketmaster at 278-TIXS.