Frank Bennett has a plan. Hurricane Claudia is bearing down on the Gulf Coast, and he’s going to board up his bed and breakfast, get everyone out, and then, once the skies clear, sell the place and finally get on with his life. It’s a good plan. It lasts about as long as it takes for the first unexpected guest to walk through the door.
That’s the setup for “Shelter Inn Place,” a new comedy by Henry Feldman that Ego Actus Theatre Company is bringing to Theater #5 at Theater Row, 410 West 42nd Street, from September 18 through October 4. Joan Kane directs. The show runs 90 minutes, and tickets are $35 general admission ($25 for seniors and students, plus fees) through the box office or by calling (212) 714-2442.
So who shows up? First, Frank’s father, who has come to “help” but is quietly nursing a plan he isn’t sharing with anyone. Then a famous TV psychologist, fleeing a very public crisis of her own, who takes the room off the lobby and asks to be left alone. Then Frank’s flamboyant ex-wife, freshly dumped by the muscular young man she left him for. And finally their 20-year-old son, who’s desperately in love and has decided the only way to convince his fiancée he “comes from a good home” is to get his divorced parents back together. Right about then, a mandatory shelter-in-place order goes into effect.
With nowhere to go and nothing to do but wait out the storm, everyone in the Pelican Bay Bed and Breakfast ends up facing the things they’ve spent years avoiding. Frank, a lifelong people-pleaser who’s put everyone else’s needs ahead of his own, finds himself asking the question a lot of people in the so-called sandwich generation eventually get to: when is it his turn? The play finds the comedy in starting over, accepting your family for who they actually are, and figuring out how to be happy when you can’t leave.
Feldman didn’t have to invent the hurricane. In 2008, he and his wife went two weeks without power after Hurricane Ike tore through Houston, where he lived for 40 years. At the same time, he was looking after an aging father while his college-age twins kept calling from out of town wanting his attention. “All this got put in my mind’s blender,” he says, “and out came this play.”
The result has already had one run in the city. An earlier version, then titled “Shelter in Place,” got a developmental production at The Players Theatre on MacDougal Street this past January. Opening Night Online called it “everything that makes Off-Broadway theater indispensable,” HiDrama called it “a fun situation comedy set in a hurricane,” and Splash Magazine singled out its “well-placed puns, clever physical comedy” and “punchy performances.” Feldman went back and rewrote, and somewhere in the process the title picked up an extra “n.”
Feldman is an actor turned playwright who studied acting and directing at the University of Houston after earning an engineering degree from Rice. He now splits his time between Cold Spring, NY and the city. All of his plays so far are comedies, and two of them, “Sea Level Rise: A Dystopian Comedy” and “Global Warming: A Comedy,” take on climate change.
Kane is the founding artistic director of Ego Actus, which she started in 2009 with Bruce A! Kraemer. Her directing credits include “Play Nice!” at 59E59 Theaters, “I Know What Boys Want” at Theatre Row and “Sycorax, Cyber Queen of Qamara” at HERE, plus productions in Oslo and Prague. She was named Best Director at the 2016 United Solo Festival and inducted into the Indie Theatre Hall of Fame by nytheatre.com. Since 2009, Ego Actus has produced 35 festival shows across 15 festivals, including the Edinburgh, New York, Prague and Ottawa Fringes, picking up 61 award nominations and 21 wins along the way.
The cast features Mike Roche as Frank, Martin Revere as his father George, Alyssa Simon as TV psychologist Heidi Murphy, Aaron Lamm as Frank’s son Sam, and Haley Zale as Mildred, the ex-wife. Kraemer designs the lighting, with sets by Evan Frank, costumes by Cat Fisher, sound by Ian Wehrle and props by Max Kilsheimer. The casting director is Robin Carus, CSA.
“Shelter Inn Place” previews on Friday, September 18 and opens Saturday, September 19. Performances are Tuesday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m., through October 4.
More information is at the show’s website, and tickets can be purchased here (use promo code ESF for discounted $25 tickets).
