StarBulletin.com

'Honor' full of firsts


By

POSTED: Friday, November 06, 2009

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.”;