Community play opens in Washington this week

WASHINGTON — The Washington Community Theater is running its production of “My Three Angels” at the community center this week, with shows on Dec. 2, 3 and 4 at 7:30 p.m., as well as a 2:30 p.m. show on Dec. 5.

Theater Board President and Play Director Lynn Loula said the show about an unlikely friendship between a struggling family and three convicts performing roof work, was a holiday favorite of hers.

“I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it, something like 30 rehearsals, and I still laugh at things, at new things, even,” she said. “I think people will really enjoy the humor and with the Christmas connection, it kind of makes it neat for this time of year.”

The performance is a long-awaited return to normal, with the pandemic canceling community plays for the last year and a half.

“We hadn’t done a play since, well, it’d be two years ago this spring,” Loula said. “We were ready to do a play again and it wasn’t a part of the regular season because we didn’t have the first two plays in the season, so we could set it in December and go with the Christmas idea.”

Loula said while she was happy with how the show turned out, it was a challenge to cast at first.

“There are three parts where the men should be just in their 20s or maybe even a little younger, (but) most of our local people that love to act are a little bit older than that,” she said. “But once we got it all set, I loved it because everybody in the show is playing their own age.”

Thankfully the eight-week practice period, which began in October, helped cover for gaps in the cast early on.

“It was several weeks before I had the entire cast,” Loula said. “But a couple of parts that I didn’t have cast didn’t come up until later in the play in the third act rather than the first.”

Another issue came with set design. Loula said the crew had worked hard to depict the play’s location in 1910 French Guiana, a tropical setting far from Washington’s December climate.

“Kat Nelson is the manager out at the community center, and she ends up usually designing our sets,” she said. “Her big idea was that there should be a lot of bamboo involved … a lot of us were involved in making carpet tubes look like bamboo. Kat came up with the process for doing this and it looks amazing, you won’t believe it when you see it.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com