Sheryl Donchey

Who's afraid of a big, bad three-hour play? Not Thom B. Hill and Sheryl Donchey. Hill, dean of fine and performing arts at Santa Ana College, and Donchey, who chairs the theater department, are starring in a campus production of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," Edward Albee's grimly funny case study of the damage done when academic life goes sour.

Who's afraid of a big, bad three-hour play? Not Thom B. Hill and Sheryl Donchey. Hill, dean of fine and performing arts at Santa Ana College, and Donchey, who chairs the theater department, are starring in a campus production of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," Edward Albee's grimly funny case study of the damage done when academic life goes sour.

Josefina Lopez's "Confessions of Women From East L.A." has been produced just once since she wrote it in 1996--and that was nowhere near East L.A., but 100 miles south, in San Diego. It's an eight-character portrait of specific women in East Los Angeles and Little Tokyo, some of whom are based on women Lopez knows--like the play's self-described "super Latina" Victoria Marquez-Bernstein.

To director Sheryl Donchey's credit, her treatment of "Guys and Dolls" at Rancho Santiago College leaves this classic in recognizable form. It's not that the Frank Loesser musical is shoddily done by the college's Professional Actors Conservatory. The stage is fixed up in a Cubist style that serves to excite the eye in a confetti swirl of color and silhouetted forms. This effectively captures the vibrancy of a crowded city street scene.

Craig Lucas' "Prelude to a Kiss" is a story play rather than a play based on character. Actually it's a sort of modern fairy tale, simple in its structure and in its approach to its subject of one personality accidentally switching bodies with another and their struggle to effect a return trip. The play's value depends on how much depth and color the actors in the central roles add to the sketchy forms Lucas has given them.

Stephen Sondheim's 1962 "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" is a pseudo-bawdy affair, based on a lot of early stories of licentiousness in the ancient world, and it has always seemed a little thrown together at the last minute. In fact, the opening number, "Comedy Tonight" was thrown in at the last minute before its Broadway opening.

Anybody expecting to meet Lady Di and Prince Charles in "The Royal Family," at Rancho Santiago College's Phillips Hall Theatre through Sunday, should be advised: The royalty in this grandiose comedy of theatrical manners are the Cavendishes, a family of New York actors originally conceived as a sendup of the Barrymores. Written by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, the play premiered on Broadway in 1927, despite the threat of a legal suit by Ethel Barrymore, who took offense at being spoofed.

Richard Harris' "Stepping Out" is one of those vehicles perfectly suited to a young, spunky theater group that wants to hop on board and take us on a ride somewhere. The ride is amusingly bumpy in director-choreographer Sheryl Donchey's staging (assisted by Robert G. Leigh) at Rancho Santiago College. Harris' play, about tap dancing as an escape from life's miseries, is at its best in the least "professional" setting.

Rancho Santiago College has staged a sexy and playful "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," Stephen Sondheim's farcical ode to hedonism in ancient Rome. Director Sheryl Donchey emphasizes the bawdy in this 1962 musical, peopling it with bikini-clad courtesans, grubbing procurers, salacious noblemen and sly, opportunistic slaves. The lines are heavy with double-entendres, and the sight gags feature a fair amount of groping and shimmying.

In program notes for her theater piece "Confessions of Women From East L.A.," playwright Josefina Lopez argues that Latinas have always been "categorized and portrayed as virgins, mothers, and whores." Lopez says she is none of those--and all of those--and that her play's characters show facets of her and her mother. From the evidence onstage in this revival at Santa Ana College's Phillips Hall Little Theatre West, Lopez and her mother are two very complicated women.

Among the one-act's best features is its very playfulness. The stakes are usually lower than with a full-length work--you almost always expect a compressed one-act to move to an experimental beat, or at least have an unpredictably individual edge--and the writer often approaches it gleefully as a blank check for revealing closeted thoughts, dreams or gripes.