Last Saturday was the closing night of Dracula on the Little Theatre of Alexandria stage. The community theater’s next production will be the Christmas classic A Christmas Carol, starting on Nov. 30; but things won’t be dormant on the LTA stage from now until then. Starting Monday, LTA will host its inaugural Free Fall Festival, emphasizing the community aspect of its mission by not only providing a series of free performances of one-act plays, musicals and improv throughout the week, but giving a showcase for some local talent.
“This is a week that we have once a year where it’s downtime in our calendar, so we thought it would be a great idea to try to bring these activities in,” says Rachel Alberts, the spokesperson for LTA.
The week will start on Monday evening, when five selected one-act plays will be performed. The plays, which were submitted and selected from entrants off a call from LTA, include an adaptation of The Park Bench by Christope Chabouté from Ruben Vellekoop; A Study in Separation by Billy Cosgrove; Sleeping by Jessica Cooperstock; and “Fly Like an Angel,” from Prohibition: The Musical by Neal Learner. While some of the writers are not local, the production teams and the actors in them are part of LTA’s NextGen LTA group.
NextGen is a group of people 40 and younger in the community that want to participate in theater. LTA gives them different opportunities to do so, including one-acts and improv performances. In addition to the one-act plays on Monday, LTA’s Retrocessionists—the theater’s improv troupe—will make people laugh with a pair of performances as part of the festival on Friday and Saturday.
In addition to its own group of thespians, LTA is supporting a smaller local theater and one of its works. Wednesday will see the performance of Through the 4th Wall’s 19, a musical about women winning the right to vote. Through the 4th Wall has previously workshopped the show with the help of LTA, but now will give a performance of the entire show. 19 is from Jennifer Schwed, Doug Bradshaw and Charlie Barnett.
“We are a community theater and we take that very seriously, and we have this very rich and varied community,” says Alberts. “And so we wanted to partner with another theater and provide them space for rehearsal and any kind of other ancillary things that they might need to help out on a production. It’s a very important piece.”
The LTA Free Fall Festival begins Monday with the one-act plays starting at 8 p.m. The performance of 19 will be on Wednesday at 7 p.m. The improv performances will be Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. The one-act plays and improv shows are for those 18 and older. // thelittletheatre.com
