Casting call ongoing for ‘Runt’
Actors in rotation ramp up the hilarity in office comedy
The latest play at Alameda’s Altarena Playhouse, “Eat the Runt” might be just another office comedy, albeit an outrageously wacky one, were it not for its central gimmick: The audience gets to cast the show every single night.
There are nine actors in the ensemble, eight of whom perform on any given night. The first 20 minutes of the show are taken up with casting, with director Timothy Beagley serving as a sort of emcee. After briefly greeting the audience and lobbying for particular roles they’d love to play, each of the actors does a comedic audition piece, and then the audience votes by applause who should play each role.
The trouble is, there are only seven roles listed, so part of that process is also deciding who will have to sit that evening out. It’s a difficult choice, as evidenced on opening night when the last two actors picked were both tremendously charismatic performers (Dan Kurtz and Jayme Catalano). All individual actors mentioned from here on out will be in reference to their roles on opening night, when Jacqui Herrera was the absent performer.
It’s an appealing setup that guarantees a substantially different experience every night. Obviously, everyone has to learn all the roles, so they all have to be versatile and ready to shift into whatever mode that evening’s part demands.
All of the characters in Avery Crozier’s comedy are written as gender-neutral, and there are some amusing in-jokes about that. In one of the few times a specific pronoun is used, it turns out to be referring to somebody else who’s not part of the plot. There are, however, a lot of sex gags in the script and a couple of discussions of racism that have a different subtext, depending on who’s playing them.
The structure of the play is comically simple. Merritt (an amiable Jason Berner) is applying for a development job at a modern art museum in Chicago and interviewing with each of the higher-ups at the institution one-onone. In each of these twoperson encounters, Merritt takes on a different persona. At first it seems to be simply a matter of adapting to whatever seems to be most advantageous in matching or countering the personality of the other person, but increasingly, it seems like Merritt is just messing with people.
Friendly grant writer Chris (mild-mannered Diana Brown) ushers Merritt from one interview to the next and may also be a candidate for the same job. The applicant meets a relentlessly negative human resources coordinator (an amusingly adenoidal Kim Long), an inappropriately flirty and catty director of development (a hysterical Max Thorne), a standoffish curator (Fred Pitts, with curiously staccato intonation), a flustered trustee (J Jha, pricelessly skittish) and the stodgy museum director (an increasingly jumpy Kurtz). There are some delightful twists and surprises along the way, the largest of which sets up a second act that’s a funhouse mirror image of the first.
As the conversations get more and more outrageous, they also become more ludicrous, until it’s impossible to believe the applicant could possibly be on the level. That makes the twists a little easier to anticipate, but the plot isn’t really the point here. It’s all the high jinks along the way that make “Eat the Runt” so entertaining, and director Beagley and the admirably adaptable ensemble ramp up the hilarity at every turn. It’s enough to make you want to come again to see how it plays with the actors reshuffled into different roles, which is exactly the effect a show like this ought to have.