OPENING NIGHT MUTINY By Two Local Playwrights Starts Next Week At Players' Ring

It's hard to believe a director would fire a leading actor a day before a show is set to open, or that actors would change the lines of the script the first night of the show.
But such debacles are not merely the stuff of farcical fiction, but also the real live events that have been captured in "Opening Night Mutiny," a show written by two York natives that will run Jan 25 to Feb 10 at the Players' Ring in Portsmouth.

"Most of the scenes in it and are true stories that happened to one of us or to someone we met, or they reflect a scandal big enough to have made national news" said Alex Bickerstaff, co-writer of "Opening Night Mutiny" with friend Michael Freitag.

Based at the fictional South Shore Playhouse, "Opening Night Mutiny" tells the story of an exhausted cast and crew who are trying to premiere their new season despite a few, small, tiny, minuscule setbacks. These sets backs include, but are not limited to, replacing the fired lead actor during dress rehearsal with an understudy who's been studying the wrong script; working with an inflexible playwright, and actors rewriting that script behind the playwright's back, and being caught in 'the act' mere hours before the show opens.

This series of escalating hi-jinks results in the outraged author pulling the rights to the show. right as the curtain rises. As the cast tries to perform with a half-written script, they must deal with the fact that nobody has rehearsed it, it's set in space, and the playwright is in the front row.

Within the show are terms that Bickerstaff, an actor and director studying theater in college, coined to describe familiar theater occurrences. His "small pond syndrome" addresses what happens when "a lot of people and a lot of the characters in the show have the right mixture of success, pride and naiveté to make them think they are much bigger than they are. It is meant to poke fun at the more pretentious things we do in theater." And the show's title refers to"what happens when actors nod along with what they are told to do and then do what they want when they get to opening night."

Bickerstaff, a junior at State University of New York in Purchase has written plays before, but "Opening Night Mutiny" is the first that has gone this far, getting performed on a professional stage. This is a first script for Freitag, an actor who works in IT at Ogunquit Playhouse.

The two, who have performed together, collaborated as "Outcast Productions" to write "Opening Night Mutiny" after Bickerstaff came to Freitag with this idea.

"Alex approached me with these real life ideas that are stranger than fiction and asked me to help him make this real," said Freitag.

"I thought our styles would blend well and bring us to something better than either of us could write on our own," Bickerstaff said.

What they ended up with Freitag describes as "a farcical ensemble comedy that presents theater in a larger than life away, that brings together authentic stories happening on the same night, stories that are very real to the people who have been through these moments."

Opening Night Mutiny will be performed Friday to Sunday, Jan. 25 to Feb. 10 at the Players' Ring Theatre at 105 Marcy St. in Portsmouth with shows Friday and Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm. Tickets are $18 with discounts for students, seniors, and Players' Ring members. Reservations can be made at playersring.org or 603-436-8123.

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