The State College Community Theatre will leave reality at the door as it performs An Evening of Very Strange Plays, this weekend at the Boal Barn Playhouse, Boalsburg.

The show includes three one-act plays: Christopher Durang's The Actor's Nightmare, F. Xavier Hogan's The Swimmer and Eugene Ionesco's The Bald Soprano. The shows are all in the absurd theater style and are interpretations of nightmares.

In The Actor's Nightmare, accountant George Spelvin finds himself inside a theater without any recollection of how he got there.

George is thrust onstage and has to take the place of another actor without any knowledge of the show.

Elaine Meder-Wilgus, who plays actress Dame Ellen Terry in The Actor's Nightmare, explained that several different plays are all being performed in the same show, from Shakespeare's Hamlet to Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, but Spelvin has no idea what is going on.

"It seems perfectly reasonable that these several pieces are included in the same performance," Meder-Wilgus said. "We start the play as if the show must go on, even though the actor sharing the stage with us apparently has no idea what is going on. The result is hilarious."

The Bald Soprano is one of the by-products of Ionesco's attempt to learn English as his third language. Using the Assimil conversation method, which requires transcribing short, simple, nonsensical sentences, Ionesco created the basis of the play from the sentences he found in his practice exercises.

Mark Schroeder (sophomore-theatre), who plays the fire chief in The Bald Soprano, said the play deals with the tragic ailments of social irrelevance in our culture.

'The play involves two couples who communicate entirely through cryptic and senseless dialogues with one another simply for the purpose of hearing themselves speak," Schroeder said.

The Swimmer centers on a young man at a corner bus stop. Although there is no water in the vicinity, he is convinced that he is drowning.

Each passer-by becomes involved in his situation, but each is more interested in promoting his or her own points of view than in helping him.

The performances all have what director Caitlin Osborne calls an "absurdist flair" that she hopes will appeal in a different way to audience members.

"I hope the audience lets themselves go," she said. "Just go along for the ride. Some of what happens in these plays doesn't seem to make any sense at first, but that's what makes them funny and unexpected."

Osborne chose the three one-act shows because it gave her the opportunity to not divide the cast into lead parts and secondary roles.

"My goal was to find an evening of theater that would use a large group of actors, and to provide each with an interesting and challenging role," she said.

The unique atmosphere of the Boal Barn Playhouse also creates a different theater experience, both for the actors and members of the audience.

The Boal Barn Playhouse is a theater in the round, which means actors have to move more frequently around the stage.

Tom Pogue (junior-theatre), who performs in The Actor's Nightmare, explained that because the audience is close to the stage, an actor has to be aware of everything surrounding him or her.

"With the audience on every side of you, the actors must make sure that they are seen and heard by the majority of people," he said. "It's a challenge, but it also gives a lot of freedom in movement on stage."

Osborne's ambition for the evening is to be creative and to keep. She hopes that these tactics will keep the audience engaged, interested, and let them enjoy each seperate perfomance. She said an audience member should have no expectations about what may happen because just about anything could happen.

"Expect the unexpected," she said. "Each show is a little like a dream. Situations are constantly shifting, and the characters are all adapting to the strange things that go on around them."