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'Honor' full of firsts

An actor's debut as playwright is also a launch for LCC's stage

By John Berger

POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Nov 06, 2009

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Reb Beau Allen has an impressive list of acting credits playing heroes, antiheroes and villains alike. He also stood out in a nonspeaking role in last year's short-lived production of "Waikiki Nei' at the Royal Hawaiian Theater.

Come Nov. 13 he'll add "produced playwright" to his resume. That's the night his first full-length original play, "Honor Amongst Thieves," an epic tale of pirates and vampires, opens at Leeward Community College.

"I've been working on it almost a year," Allen said, taking a break during rehearsal for a quick telephone interview last weekend.

Allen will celebrate another "first" on opening night: "Honor" is the first full-length work written by a LCC alumnus to be presented by the community college as its fall main stage production.

'HONOR AMONGST THIEVES'

Where: Leeward Community College Theatre, 96-045 AlaIke St.

When: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 4 p.m. Sundays Nov. 13-21

Cost: $18 general admission; $15 for students, seniors and military; $10 for children under 12

Info: 455-0385 or www.hsblinks.com/189

 
It's also one of the biggest to be staged there -- so big, in fact, that Allen doesn't expect it to be produced here again.

"Tony Pisculli, who's doing the stage combat, says there's three times as much stage combat as any play he's ever done," he said. "With 50-something actors onstage I can't imagine another theater doing it, even another college production."

Big as it is, Allen had something larger in mind when he wrote the original script.

"Originally, for this production itself, the concept I had in my head, it was three plays ... (and) then the original script was 136 pages long. It ended up being a short novel. My major task after I wrote it was editing it."

The 136-page version would have run about 3 1/2 hours not counting intermissions, and Allen "had to change a lot of things around" to get the production to its current length. With the three plays now condensed into one, he doesn't expect to write a sequel after the curtain falls on this production.

The show is a big one for Allen in other ways, as well. He's the male lead (Capt. John Blackheart), and also co-directs with Paul Cravath. He described the process of bringing the characters to life as "a negotiation, but a pleasant one."

"There's times that I have things in my head that I wrote and saw specific images, (or) a specific way things were said, and then I see an actor bring their own take on it," he said. "At first it's kind of shocking as a writer, but then in a really pleasant happy way it changes my view on what I originally saw."

 

Reb Beau Allen has an impressive list of acting credits playing heroes, antiheroes and villains alike. He also stood out in a nonspeaking role in last year's short-lived production of "Waikiki Nei' at the Royal Hawaiian Theater.

COURTESY LCC THEATRE
Salem Sipes puts the bite on Reb Beau Allen in "Honor Amongst Thieves."

Come Nov. 13 he'll add "produced playwright" to his resume. That's the night his first full-length original play, "Honor Amongst Thieves," an epic tale of pirates and vampires, opens at Leeward Community College.

"I've been working on it almost a year," Allen said, taking a break during rehearsal for a quick telephone interview last weekend.

Allen will celebrate another "first" on opening night: "Honor" is the first full-length work written by a LCC alumnus to be presented by the community college as its fall main stage production.

'HONOR AMONGST THIEVES'

Where: Leeward Community College Theatre, 96-045 AlaIke St.

When: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 4 p.m. Sundays Nov. 13-21

Cost: $18 general admission; $15 for students, seniors and military; $10 for children under 12

Info: 455-0385 or www.hsblinks.com/189

 
It's also one of the biggest to be staged there -- so big, in fact, that Allen doesn't expect it to be produced here again.

"Tony Pisculli, who's doing the stage combat, says there's three times as much stage combat as any play he's ever done," he said. "With 50-something actors onstage I can't imagine another theater doing it, even another college production."

Big as it is, Allen had something larger in mind when he wrote the original script.

"Originally, for this production itself, the concept I had in my head, it was three plays ... (and) then the original script was 136 pages long. It ended up being a short novel. My major task after I wrote it was editing it."

The 136-page version would have run about 3 1/2 hours not counting intermissions, and Allen "had to change a lot of things around" to get the production to its current length. With the three plays now condensed into one, he doesn't expect to write a sequel after the curtain falls on this production.

The show is a big one for Allen in other ways, as well. He's the male lead (Capt. John Blackheart), and also co-directs with Paul Cravath. He described the process of bringing the characters to life as "a negotiation, but a pleasant one."

"There's times that I have things in my head that I wrote and saw specific images, (or) a specific way things were said, and then I see an actor bring their own take on it," he said. "At first it's kind of shocking as a writer, but then in a really pleasant happy way it changes my view on what I originally saw."

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