OC’s biggest supporter of new plays by local playwrights gets a world production of his own
By Joel Beers
If you shake Eric Eberwein’s family tree, be prepared to dodge the military. In every generation, reaching back to his great-grandfathers, members of his family have served. While Eberwein didn’t follow that tradition, he’s been engaged in another form of service for the past 25 years: helping develop and produce more than 150 new plays by local playwrights.
“I guess I’m service-oriented; I like to serve people,” said Eberwein, who has been the director of the Orange County Playwrights Alliance since 1998 and co-producer of OC-Centric, the county’s only new play festival for playwrights with OC connections.
The services Eberwein provides—from securing local theatre venues for OCPA staged readings and other events to finding the right actors and directors for those scripts—are quite different from what’s expected in the military.
But Eberwein is also a playwright, the author of about 40 one-acts and full-length plays. And who better serves the theatre than those who provide new material, keeping it fresh, dynamic, and relevant? In his play “Peace Be With You”, which is receiving its world premiere at The Wayward Artist, Eberwein’s theatre service converges with his family’s military legacy.
“I come from a long line of military people, and I don’t think my family is different from many others in that respect,” said Eberwein. “There was a time when military service was part of the generational American experience. Now it isn’t. Less than three percent of the country serves in any capacity, including active reservists and defense contractors.
“I’m fascinated by the fact that fewer Americans seem to understand, or even want to understand, what military service is like. Maybe there’s a part of me that feels guilty for not serving, and this play emerged from that mix of guilt and fascination.”
That’s not to say the play is about the military service of anyone in his family; but it was the spark that led to a story that Eberwein describes as being about “somebody who signs up for the military, sees combat, how that affects him, and how it affects the people who love him.”
But that’s just the elevator pitch; after running the idea “through the usual playwriting Cuisinart that stranges things up,” as Eberwein puts it, the play became far more complex, ambiguous, and open-ended, something Eberwein accomplishes through how he tells the story—and how he doesn’t.
The play begins with 18-year-old Lee announcing his enlistment in the Marines and ends three years later with him back home on leave. Though he's removed from the physical battleground, he now faces an emotional one, where the lines of engagement are far less clear. Despite spanning three years, the play doesn’t feel like it unfolds in strictly chronological fashion. That’s partly due to its brisk pacing.
“All my full-length plays tend to have more than 15 scenes and move around a lot,” Eberwein said. “I don’t write, and usually don’t enjoy watching plays that present the same static stage picture for 30 or 60 minutes.”
The play’s fluidity is enhanced by Eberwein’s use of non-linear storytelling techniques, such as time jumps and flashbacks, characters shifting instantaneously into different roles, and monologues that blend the abstract thinking of free verse with informal conversational prose. This theatricality blurs the line between reality and imagination, paralleling Lee’s journey.
What Eberwein doesn’t do is spoon-feed the audience. Craig Holland, Wayward’s managing director, says that while at its most basic level, the play is a domestic drama with a love triangle at the center (Lee is in love with a fellow Marine eight years his senior but also still has feelings for his best friend and ex-girlfriend Courtney), there’s an element of mystery where “you’re not really quite sure how things are going to turn out or even what just happened. And that, to me, elevates this to a different class and makes it so engaging and intriguing.”
Director Joe Lauderdale, directing his first play at Wayward but no stranger to Orange County stages after running Laguna Playhouse’s youth theatre program for 17 years and helping build No Square Theatre in Laguna Beach, says that the play’s theatricality also makes it a “wonderful piece for a director because it leaves so much to interpretation. There are so many possible options to explore both for myself as director and with the cast.”
That ambiguity, or favoring open-ended questions rather than definitively answering them, isn’t an accident.
“Ambiguity is a good thing in storytelling,” Eberwein said. “Playwriting should be nuanced. It presents complex people and situations, like life. A long time ago, [New York Times theatre critic] Frank Rich said that bad playwriting had an ‘open-shut intellectual simplicity;’ something either is or isn't, this person is either this kind of person or that kind of person. That's bad playwriting. You want to embrace complexity and nuance, it's realistic.”
The play, developed via three staged readings and a finalist at two play festivals, was also one of two chosen for the inaugural Erica Bennett Prize. The annual award, which was bequeathed to OCPA through the estate of Bennett, an OCPA member fiercely committed to playwriting, is determined by a panel of judges unaffiliated with OCPA who choose the most exemplary drama and comedy written by its members. Eberwein’s play earned best drama laurels and Paula Fell won for best comedy in 2023 (Karen Howes and Baylee Schlichtman were 2024 recipients).
As a reader of countless new plays and a studious connoisseur of plays in general, Eberwein is capable of examining his own body of work to determine if patterns emerge. He says many of his eight full-length plays do share a couple of thematic connections.
“A number of them seem to be about people who are young and trying to figure out who they are,” he said. “They are people trying to be important and significantly more global and liberal. So if there’s a common theme, I guess that’s it.
“I also seem to write frequently about the journeys people take into and through subcultures. By that, I mean the dictionary definition like a cultural group (Marines) within a larger culture (American society), often having beliefs or interests at variance with those of the larger culture (high-intensity, high-commitment).”
This is the fourth world premiere staged by Wayward and the first from a non-company member. It has also partnered with OCPA on two themed evenings of 10-minute plays called “Ju1ce” as well as a new playwriting intensive, “Embark.”
The company’s commitment to new plays is one reason why Eberwein, who is perhaps the keenest observer of local theatre over the past 30 years, believes that despite the pandemic closing three theatres kind to original plays—STAGES, Stagedoor Rep, and Modjeska Playhouse—there has never been more interest in new plays among so many.
Along with Wayward, he cites The Larking House Theatre Company, a new company with new play development at its forefront, the Page to Stage new playwrights festival, which champions the voices of women and turned four this April, the community-based and other playwriting initiatives of the Breath of Fire Latina Theatre Ensemble, the 12-year run of OC-Centric, and New Voices, a playwright’s organization formed two years after OCPA (Chance Theater and South Coast Repertory cast a much wider net and attract playwrights from across the county).
Taking all that in can almost make someone feel that their service has not been in vain.
“OCPA has gone from meeting every couple of weeks in a doctor’s office to being a bona fide new play development organization, and part of being that is serving playwrights, which I feel is a great thing to do,” Eberwein said. “And it’s been amazing to see the theatre community grow, and the number of really skilled playwrights around here grow. And I’d like to think that as the community has evolved, we’ve evolved with it.”
Joel Beers has typed about Orange County theatre longer than he would freely admit. You can visit him at his rarely updated blog, www.fermentedbeers.com.
“Peace Be With You”
The Wayward Artist
125 N. Broadway, #E, Santa Ana, CA
September 13 - 22, 2024
(657) 205-6273, www.thewaywardartist.org
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