‘Reflections on the Future’: 1 of Those One-Act Evenings

Get ready for something old, something new and something blue. This weekend, Studio City’s Company of CharActors Theatre opens a bill of one-acts under the umbrella title “Reflections on the Future in Three Tenses.” The program consists of an untitled curtain raiser, Robert Spera’s “The Field” and Murphy Guyer’s “The American Century.”

“The Field,” which was written a decade ago when Spera was a resident director at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, plays out the high-wire tension between two young American soldiers in Vietnam, tentatively crossing a booby-trapped minefield. (An expanded version of this 18-minute one-act, “Tracks,” which Spera co-authored with Sherman Howard, was well-received last summer at the Alliance Repertory Theatre in Burbank.)

“These are two incredibly different plays, but with common themes,” said producer Karl Lucht, who also appears in all three pieces.

“The backdrop is war, but it’s not an evening of preaching. Basically, it’s people trying to get back home--from the war, and from the future.”

As a curtain raiser, Lucht and actress-director Victoria Saxon have written a prologue establishing a link between the two plays. “Then we fade into blue light,” Lucht said, “and go into ‘The Field.’ ”

In Guyer’s dark comedy, “The American Century,” which has played locally at Theatre West in 1986 and at the Tamarind in 1990, a troubled man time-travels from the present to visit his parents in 1945--on the night of his own conception. To the parents’ disbelief, the Stranger proceeds to warn them of the horrors that lie ahead, including family issues of homosexuality and anorexia, and the father’s bouts with alcoholism, gambling and arson.

Lucht, who began acting at the University of Chapel Hill in North Carolina, originally saw both one-acts at Louisville, where he was working as a producer at the CBS affiliate WHAS, and feels a kinship with the character he plays in “The American Century.”

“The guy wants the comfort of home, the idealism of his childhood,” he said. “I think the point is, you’re going to spend your life--either on a minefield or in therapy--trying to go home. But you never really can.”

“Reflections on the Future in Three Tenses” plays at 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays at the Company of CharActors Theatre, 12655 Ventura Blvd., Studio City, through Feb. 15. Tickets: $6. Call: (818) 508-8838.