The Humboldt and Area Theatre Club is putting on a fall show. And it is not one show but four. "The show is actually four shows and we're calling all four of them together A Comedy Quartet," Ian Elliott, a director of one of the plays and a board member of the club, told Discover Humboldt.
The format is the experiment. Four twenty-minute comedies, each with its own director and its own style of humour, run back to back. "All four plays have a different director, and none of us have directed a play here before," Elliott said. "Three people have directed plays before, just not in Humboldt." The four directors are Ian Elliott, Anthony Ross, Christopher Harrow and Rachel Wormsbecher.
For a club that has built its reputation on full-length productions, the shift to one-acts is deliberate. "We were definitely ready to try experimenting a little bit, which is why we're back in the fall and we haven't been in the fall since before COVID," Elliott said. "Some one-act plays just makes things a little bit different." The pandemic had pushed the club out of its autumn slot; returning to it with a quartet of short plays rather than a single evening-long script is a way of marking the return as something new.
The run is compact. There is an evening performance on Friday, October 23 at 7 p.m., then two shows on Saturday, October 24, a 2 p.m. matinee and a 7 p.m. evening show. Tickets are $25.
Audiences should know one thing going in: the humour is not uniformly family-friendly. There are a few swear words in one of the four plays that may not be suitable for young children. The rest of the bill is open to everyone.
What Elliott keeps coming back to is the pace. "This has just been an absolutely wonderful experiment and experience," he said. "And I think getting to see four plays in two hours or less is really cool." Four stories, four directors, four different comic sensibilities, and an intermission's worth of time saved.
A Comedy Quartet adds four short plays to the club's history in a single weekend, and hands the directing reins to four people who have never steered a Humboldt stage before.
For anyone in the Humboldt area who has watched the club's usual fare and wondered what it might do with a looser, faster, more varied format, this is the answer: four short, funny plays, one weekend, and a Friday night slot the club has not occupied since before the pandemic.