LAFPI

Debbie Devine directs the West Coast premiere of Kerry Muir’s magical, surreal, dream-like movie-within-a play, The Night Buster Keaton Dreamed Me, at 24th Street Theatre.

Maya Brattkus (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Crucible at Theatricum Botanicum) and Olivia Cristina Delgado (A Mexican Trilogy at the LATC, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest at the Broad) star as sisters Haley and Renata, fending for themselves in a fire-scarred apartment. So far, they’ve managed to elude Child Protective Services, but now it looks like Mrs. Giamatti next door (radio host/voiceover artist Keri Tombazian) might be on to them. Is this all a dream? Or are they being filmed for a movie like the ones their mother used to take them to at the Silent Movie Theatre on Fairfax? (Tony Duran, seen at 24th Street in La Razon Blindada, portrays the “director”; the original silent movie score is composed and performed live by Bradley Brough.) When Buster Keaton (John Ellsworth Phillips, whose credits include Julius Caesar with Independent Shakespeare Company) mysteriously appears on the eve of Haley’s birthday, the boundaries of the girls’ reality are stretched.

The Night Buster Keaton Dreamed Me was the winner of the 2010 Maxim Mazumdar Award (under its original title, Cut-Ups). It premiered at the Alleyway Theatre in Buffalo, NY, where the Buffalo News called it, “A surrealistic play about personal loss and the power of the imagination… bouncy and moody, hungry and hostile, dreamy and daffy all at once.”

The play was recently published in a Spanish translation by Ercilia Sahores, and the production will include Spanish supertitles. Appropriate for adults and audiences 12 and up

The Night Buster Keaton Dreamed Me opens on Saturday, April 11 and continues through May 31, with performances on Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m. (dark April 12). Previews take place March 28 through April 5 on the same schedule, with one additional preview performance scheduled on Friday, April 3 at 8 p.m.

For more information, visit www.24thstreet.org

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