Time Traveler – ELEMENTS THEATER COLLECTIVE STAGES VIRGINIA WOOLF’S ‘ORLANDO’ AS A POP-UP

The "Orlando" cast, clockwise from left, Stephanie Farnum, Rob Grayson, Erika Leachman, Morgan Altenhoff and Tess Plant-Thomas
The “Orlando” cast, clockwise from left, Stephanie Farnum, Rob Grayson, Erika Leachman, Morgan Altenhoff and Tess Plant-Thomas

When Virginia Woolf published her gender-bending, time-traveling novel “Orlando” in 1928, her contemporaries initially put it down as frivolous, a distraction from the more serious work she was writing. And so it seemed doomed for decades to not be considered alongside novels like “To the Lighthouse.” That is until Sally Potter’s 1992 film version with Tilda Swinton revealed the story to be much more than fluff. “Orlando,” in a sparkling new adaptation by playwright Sarah Ruhl, continues the ascension of this work, and it closes Elements Theater Collective’s current season, starting tonight and playing in pop-up in several locations.

“This season our theme has been gender and sexuality,” says director Mary Plant-Thomas, who is marking this production as her last before she moves to San Francisco. “So it was a very explicit choice … But I also see that the play shares other core ideas with our plays, like time travel. I think that’s less a choice and more that we really value choosing new works that are also accessible.”

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Pop-Up Underworld – ELEMENTS THEATRE RETURNS WITH THE DARK FANTASY ‘KING OF SHADOWS’

Courtesy photo
Courtesy photo

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.

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One Step Forward, One Back – Elements Theater returns with a time-bending musical

Elisha Schaefer
Elisha Schaefer

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.

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