It isn’t often that a play has its world premiere right here in San Luis Obispo County.
Not only is this weekend the first time audiences will get a look at No Man’s Land, it’s the first play written by Alicia Klein, a local actor and soon-to-be produced playwright.
Local theatre company Exit Pursued by a Bear is offering up free performances of the play June 4, 5 and 6 at 7 p.m. indoors in the Library Community Room in downtown SLO, and June 11, 12, and 13 outdoors at The Lavra in Arroyo Grande.
Klein joins the cast playing Artemis, one of three Greek goddesses (Beka Bourdons and Sarah Ruth Smith play Athena and Persephone, respectively) who forge a refuge for women who find themselves at the mercy of violent gods and men.
No Man’s Land is Klein’s first attempt at writing a full-length play. “While I’ve been in the theatre since I was a child, I’m mainly an actor,” she says. “I have some small experience directing and teaching acting and movement to high schoolers.”
She studied acting in high school in Maryland, at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, and at the Beverly Hills Playhouse in LA before moving to the Central Coast and becoming involved in local community theatre. She lives in San Luis Obispo with her husband and 10-year-old twin boys.
“I love it here, and I love the community I have found with Exit Pursued By A Bear,” she says. “The theatre is fresh and exciting and free, and everyone is there simply because they love doing theater.”
A couple of years ago she was in rehearsal for the company’s production of Weston Scott’s Odysseus Dies at the End. “I’ve always loved a good re-telling of a story—taking a story everyone already knows and looking at it from a different point of view, or retelling it in a way that makes more sense for the world we live in now,” she says. “While working on the character Circe for Odysseus I read the book Circe by Madeline Miller, a book that does just that. Wicked does that too. I started thinking about what stories I would like to retell.”
She thought about Greek mythology and its tales of women in danger, women crying out for help, and women being “saved” by being transformed into a spring, or a tree, or a bird.
“How does that save them?” Klein wondered. “So the first hint of an idea was born: What if these women are not being changed into springs and trees and birds, but are being secreted away somewhere safe, where they can live out their lives away from the injustices of those men and gods?”
She turned the idea into a story about women finding power and space in a man’s world. “About the power of telling our own stories and not letting others tell them for us,” she adds.
Watching it come alive with actors has given me new ideas on how to continue shaping it to tell the story I want to tell.”
“I was completely overwhelmed at the thought of turning this idea into an actual play,” Klein says. “But Weston Scott held a playwriting workshop in the winter of 2025 and I started working on it, one scene at a time. It has been so fun to see it come to life.”
She spent about a year writing the first draft, then got together with some friends to hear it aloud, held auditions, and continued to work on it during rehearsals. “I still see it as a work in progress,” she says. “Watching it come alive with actors has given me new ideas on how to continue shaping it to tell the story I want to tell.
“I am so excited to bring this story to our friends and community here in SLO.”
Editor’s Note: No Man’s Land deals with mature themes, including spoken references to rape and abortion.