Identities, love stories, affairs and humor tangle together in the San Benito Stage Company’s newest theater production, which opens Friday in downtown Hollister.
“The husband has a mistress and the wife has a lover and they’re all in the house at the same time,” said Producer Anne Hall.
The French farce “Don’t Dress for Dinner”—with its general theme of “love is complicated”—will take the stage at Paine’s Restaurant & Bar at 421 East St. this Valentine’s Day weekend.
“Someone recommended it and we read the script and it was very funny,” Hall said. “It’s not as risqué as it sounds in some ways. It’s just very funny.”
With it being a dinner theater production, those attending will eat as part of the event. It’s not the first time the company has mixed dinner with theater or scheduled Valentines Day performances in the hopes of grabbing the attention of locals who just recovered from Thanksgiving and Christmas parties.
“Most of January, people spend recovering,” Hall said. “By February, they’re looking for something to do again and it tends to be a quiet time for entertainment.”
The restaurant room hosting the show holds no more than about 100 people, which makes the stage closer to the audience and lets the actors feel the crowd’s energy. There are just six characters in the cast, so they stay busy. “They’re on stage almost the entire show,” Hall said.
For cast member Sarah Smith, who plays the mistress, participating in a leading role is a long way from how she first started participating in dinner theater productions years ago.
Smith, 25, used to be a busser at these events as a teenager but now plays a character who—ironically—is the reluctant cook in the show.
Smith’s character, Suzanne, is an actress who loves the glamorous lifestyle but must pretend to be a cook after she arrives at her lover’s home and learns his wife is not going out of town as was originally expected.
“She’s very high maintenance and she wears fur coats and pearls,” Smith said. “In her mind, she has become a slave, basically. She has to wait on everybody just so her lover’s wife doesn’t find out about her.”
Smith has participated in dinner theater productions for at least a decade as an actress and director.
“It’s a lot of fun, a lot of craziness going on,” Smith said. “They should definitely be up for some laughter and a lot of confusion so they should pay attention when they see it—which I hope they would do—because they’re paying to see it.”
The show takes place during a get-away weekend and the mistresses, lovers and general identity confusion play into a much larger theme: Love can be confusing.
“As we all know, love is a very complex thing, so it kind of feeds into that same, typical subject,” Smith said.
If you go
The San Benito Stage Company will host the French farce “Don’t Dress for Dinner” at Paine’s Restaurant & Bar at 421 East Street, Hollister. The event starts at 7 p.m. Feb. 13, 14, 20, 21, 27 and at 2 p.m. Sunday Feb. 15 and 22. Tickets are $35 in advance and $40 at the door. Tickets for a table of eight cost $260 in advance and come with a complimentary bottle of wine. To purchase tickets, call the San Benito Stage Company (831) 636-0122; Postal Graphics (831) 636-3787 or Paine’s Restaurant (831) 637-3882.
