New Voices Join in an Alternative to ‘Carols’

In one play, Santa Claus gets tied up. In another, the holidays get a bit more tense when a gay man’s parents come to visit.

Ten plays, each with a Christmas theme and each 10 minutes long, are being presented this weekend at the Theatre District in Costa Mesa by New Voices Playwrights Workshop, a group of 12 aspiring dramatists who met in a playwriting class at South Coast Repertory.

“A Ten-Minute Christmas” features actors from, among other places, the theater department at UC Irvine, and proceeds will benefit the theater.

“[The plays] run the gamut from farce to drama,” said Chris Trela, 40, who founded New Voices earlier this year. “In a 10-minute play, the challenge is to get in, tell your story and get out.” The amateur playwrights in New Voices went through three courses at SCR, including an advanced class taught by Cecelia Fannon, whose “Green Icebergs” was produced on the SCR main stage several years ago.

When Fannon’s class ended in June, Trela got the idea to form New Voices to keep the group together. Soon, they were doing staged readings of works-in-progress at the Theatre District, which led to the Christmas show. Now Trela wants to get the group nonprofit status and find a permanent space so New Voices can regularly stage original works.

Its members come from varied backgrounds: a marketing director, a computer programmer, a bookstore manager, to name a few. Several have writing experience; Trela does theater reviews for the free bimonthly O.C. Metro, for example, and Amity Westcott is working on a master’s degree in creative writing at Chapman University in Orange. But the overall lack of thespian credentials has helped create camaraderie, says member Stephen Ludwig.

“I think because of our backgrounds, we don’t seem to feel threatened by each other,” said Ludwig, 50, director of the bookstore at Golden West College in Huntington Beach. “We tend to support each other rather than compete.”

Westcott, 23, has been concentrating on fiction at Chapman and took the playwriting class to develop her dialogue skills. Like others in the group, she’ll never forget that first, heady feeling of hearing an actor read her words.

“It’s a thrill I never got in my fiction,” said Westcott, whose 10-minute “Delusions of Manger” features dueling monologues, one a woman decorating a Christmas tree, the other taking the decorations down. “To actually hear your characters come alive is great, when it actually works.”

Added Ludwig: “That’s what really hooked me. The very first time I went to a rehearsal for a staged reading, this actress had my script, a dialogue between Juliet [from Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’] and Janis Joplin. It just came alive right there in the living room. It was like magic.”

“A Ten-Minute Christmas” promises an alternative to season perennials such as “A Christmas Carol.”

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Trela summed up his play, “Santa Baby,” this way: Santa Claus comes down the chimney to leave gifts for a married couple, but the wife thinks he’s her husband dressed up as Santa and plays along by tying him up.

Joked Trela: “Even if someone doesn’t like one, there’s something else coming up in less than 10 minutes.”

* “A Ten-Minute Christmas” will be performed today and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 7 p.m. at the Theatre District, 2930 Bristol St., Costa Mesa. $10. (714) 435-4043.