If a play’s characters have a relationship that goes back decades, it can help that the actors playing them have known and worked with each other for just as long.
Such is the case with the casts of “Calendar Girls” at City Lights Theater Company and “The Night Alive” at San Jose Stage Company. Both plays open Nov. 19 at their respective downtown San Jose theaters.
Tim Firth’s “Calendar Girls” tells the story of a group of women whose lives are disrupted when they do a favor for a friend, while Conor McPherson’s “The Night Alive” reveals how doing a favor for a stranger can be both satisfying and dangerous.
Anne Younan and Deb Anderson, who play Chris and Annie, respectively, in “Calendar Girls,” first worked together at City Lights in 1993 in Graham Reid’s “Remembrance.” Younan went on to become the company’s development director, and Anderson has served on City Lights’ board of directors for two years.
“It wasn’t a hard sell; I kind of recruited myself,” Anderson says of her decision to join the board. “When I did ‘The Language Archive’ here, there was an immediate sense of family.
“There’s a heart about City Lights that’s unlike other companies in the area,” Anderson adds. “Anne and Lisa (Mallette, the artistic director) are the heart of the theater.”
“I’ve been through a couple different administrations since I’ve been on staff, so this is different, especially the board,” Younan says. “It’s so grown-up; it’s not a playground anymore, it’s a business.
“I’ve been working here for 20 years now,” she adds. “I didn’t even spend that long at my well-paying job.”
Camaraderie among the cast is especially helpful in “Calendar Girls,” since the plot revolves around a group of women who pose for a nude calendar to raise money for a local hospital. The first rehearsal of the photo shoot scenes happened to fall on election night, which Anderson says worked in her favor in an odd way.
“You feel very vulnerable,” Anderson says, “but the election results were scarier than anything we were going to do on stage.”
The hardest part about staging the photo shoot scenes is being careful not to reveal too much.
“We want it to be tasteful and fun so that everyone’s comfortable,” Anderson says.
Comfort is low on the priority list for the characters in “The Night Alive.” Julian Lopez-Morillas says his character Maurice isn’t what you’d call house-proud, and when his middle-aged nephew Tommy moves in, he adds to the general squalor of their Dublin abode.
“It’s a single-room set,” says Stage Company’s artistic director Randall King, who plays Tommy. “There’s a sense of claustrophobia.”
This shut-in feeling is heightened by the arrival of prostitute Aimee (Allison F. Rich), who Tommy takes in after she’s beaten up by Kenneth, played by Jonathan Rhys Williams. When Kenneth comes calling to take back what he feels is his, Tommy experiences a resurrection of sorts while trying to defend Aimee.
This is not the first time King and Lopez-Morillas have been in a McPherson play together at Stage Company; the two appeared in “The Seafarer” in 2009. That same year, they headed the cast of a work by another Irish playwright, playing a pair of policemen who will use any means necessary to solve a string of grisly murders in Martin McDonagh’s “The Pillowman.” Rhys Williams was cast with them in the company’s 2010 production of Tom Stoppard’s “Rock ’n Roll.”
Lopez-Morillas first appeared with San Jose Stage in 1995 in “Six Characters in Search of An Author.” Rhys Williams’ association with the company goes back even further, to 1989 when he played teenager Tim in the long-running “Angry Housewives.” He shared the stage with City Lights’ Younan, who was cast as Jetta in the punk rock musical.
All this familiarity has bred a strong working relationship between the actors.
“The nice thing about working with this group is that there’s a great level of comfort,” Lopez-Morillas says. “You can just dig right in. There’s a shorthand to get to things quickly.”
“Calendar Girls” runs through Dec. 18 at City Lights Theater, 529 S. Second St., San Jose. Tickets are $19-$42 at cltc.org or 408.295.4200.
“The Night Alive” runs through Dec. 11 at The Stage, 490 S. First St., San Jose. Tickets are $30-$65 at thestage.org or 408.283.7142.
