Ever wonder what taking an acting class would be like? Or whether you’d enjoy being in a play at a local community theatre? Or who even signs up for these things?

Well, here’s your chance. By the Sea Productions is putting on a staged reading of Circle Mirror Transformation for one weekend only April 4-6. You will learn a lot from the show about some classic acting exercises, and something about the characters that playwright Annie Baker has created. 

The play itself is a wisp of a thing, and you likely will come away from it still not knowing the origin of its title. But director Chrys Barnes has inspired a quintet of brave local actors to tackle sometimes funny, sometimes poignant moments as their characters meet for “Adult Creative Drama” each week for six weeks. As the play unfolds, it seems the characters learn more about themselves and each other than they do about acting.

The very physical nature of the acting exercises requires the format of this staged reading to be more active than most, and the actors gamely take on everything from “hooping” to screeching with each other to lying on the floor trying to intuit their parts in a game of counting to 10.

Laurel Barnett-Kelty and Larry Barnes as a married couple, and Topher Lyons and Wren (the actor goes by one name) as a potential couple, gracefully and purposely dance around each in the face of some unspoken backstories that aren’t revealed until well into the second act. A strong Perri Grandy plays a young student who is a cypher to start, but at the end of the play gives us some closure to what exactly has been playing out during the preceding 90 minutes.

It would be a delight to see these actors in a fully-staged version of the play.

By Charlotte Alexander

Charlotte Alexander is an award-winning author, editor, and publisher, with experience in media, higher education, and nonprofit settings. She has been writing reviews of local theatre productions since 2010, and her work has appeared in SLO Life Magazine, SLO Journal Plus, SLO City News, Two for the Show {Central Coast}, and most recently on her website WiseToTheWords.com. She is the co-author of "When Your Pet Outlives You: Protecting Animal Companions After You Die" (New Sage Press 2002; reprinted 2004), which won a Muse Medallion Book Award from the Cat Writers’ Association. She owns and operates C|C Imprint.