When both founding members of Elements Theatre Collective respectively left Goleta and Santa Barbara to follow their graduate careers on the East Coast, there was a brief moment — at least among their fans — when the pop-up theater looked set to dissipate.
But not so. The always-evolving company returns this weekend with “King of Shadows,” under the direction of Kate Bergstrom, who currently teaches theater at Laguna Blanca Middle School.
In “The Last Five Years,” playwright Jason Robert Brown tells a typical love story: boy meets girl, they fall in love, they squabble and split. But here’s the twist: One character in the play lives out the story in linear time. The other character, sharing the same stage, tells the story in reverse order. They only overlap once, right in the middle. Oh, and it’s a musical.
That’s a DramaDesk-award winning musical, mind you, being presented by stage-hopping Elements Theater Collective tonight and running through April 28. As is the company’s wont, the play will be performed at various locations — a coffee shop, the Piano Kitchen, SHIFCO, the retirement community on the Mesa, and others — from Carp to Goleta. All shows are free with suggested donations.
Ophra Behn holds a historical position as one of the first female English dramatists, a novelist, playwright and poet who was also once a spy for the monarchy. She’s not a household name, but her adventures in the court of Charles II makes for fine drama. In the hands and pen of contemporary playwright Liz Duffy Adams, Behn’s story results in the farcical “Or,” (the comma is intentional), a 2009 play set to open as part of Elements Theater Collective’s current season.
Sara Rademacher’s Elements brings theater to pop-up locations to put on their small-cast, minimal-set productions. For “Or,” they’ll be playing at Carpinteria’s Women’s Club, Java Station in Goleta, Santa Barbara’s Pescadrome, and many other locations, culminating in a final show at the Library’s Faulkner Gallery.