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Film professor’s production addresses fear of death

With its unique theme and opportunity for the audience to meet its star cast, “The Caterer,” a play written by Cal State Long Beach film professor Brian Alan Lane, has been sold out at every show.

Featuring the actors from popular television shows—such as “Lost,” “Prison Break” and “Reading Rainbow”—”The Caterer” addresses people’s fear of death and how death teaches about the value of human life.

Lane said he was inspired to write the original version of “The Caterer” after the sudden deaths of his mother, brother and best friend in a car accident when he was 20 years old.

“I’ve always been bothered by death, that we are born to die,” Lane said. “I fear it undermines our significance, and I feel I will always have more and more to accomplish and would not like to be cut off in particular.”

One of the play’s actors is “Reading Rainbow” host LeVar Burton. Lane said he and Burton had previously worked together on an episode for “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” which Lane wrote in 1988.

“Once Brian Alan Lane wanted to write this play, I wanted him to direct it,” Burton said. “That was part of the plan.”

The play opens with a doctor’s visit and introduces its main character—Stan Guest, played by “Prison Break” actor James Hiroyuki Liao—who has a huge problem with death.

“From doing this play, I got closer to the right mental sense of death,” Liao said.

Guest tries to resolve his issues by talking with Burton’s character, Oliver Mestman. Nancy Wei, the play’s costume designer, said death was represented by Mestman’s sleek black silhouettes.

The play also included a love story between Guest and Ingrid, played by “Lost” actress, Cynthia Watros.

“The play taught me to have a sense of humor and to have a relationship with each other,” Watros said. “The play is really a love story between two people, which gives us a sense of being human.”

CSULB theater graduate student Lysa Fox helped with the cast’s choreography. Fox also did choreography for the play “Hair” in fall 2008 on campus.

Fox said much of the movement in “Hair” was improvisational and shaped as the production went along. She said she used that same technique with the love scene in “The Caterer.”

“I gave the cast the basic framework and we worked out of that place to what eventually was set for the production which changes a bit each show and I loved that,” Fox said.

Fox described the play as “the true meaning of death in a gradual mode” and said that it urges its audience to put less value in materials and more in people.

“I feel like maybe we all hope for an appropriate death, but do any of us get it?” Fox said. “I know that this story comes from a very personal place for the playwright, so I’m just grateful that he shared his thoughts and ideas.”

“The Caterer” will be showing for its final weekend at the Whitefire Theatre in Sherman Oaks on May 8 at 8 p.m., and on May 9 and May 10 at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. To get tickets or more information, visit thecatererplay.com or call (323) 960-7724.

Lane said in an e-mail that some play attendees have requested ticket profits to be donated to groups such as CSULB students, African-American churches, synagogues, and senior citizen and professional organizations.

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