24th Street Theatre finds color in the lives of two orphan girls living in a silent film world of black, white and varying shades of gray. 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, for an April 11 opening. Performances will continue through May 31, with low-priced previews taking place March 28 through April 5.

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.”Continue reading→