"Play Time" To Premiere in Riverhead

[caption id="attachment_75893" align="alignnone" width="1000"] A scene from "Play Time," which will premiere at the Vail-Leavitt Music Hall in Riverhead on Friday, February 2.[/caption]

By Michelle Trauring

When Anthony DiFranco set out to make a documentary about Long Island theater, there was only one way to understand all the players.

He needed to write a play, and produce it himself.

So, that is exactly what he did.

DiFranco turned inward and penned “66 Candles,” informed by his own misadventures with entering the golden years, and helped along by the talent that appear in his documentary, “Play Time” — making its debut as part of the East End Fringe Festival on Friday, February 2, at the Vail-Leavitt Music Hall in Riverhead.

“I’m a big fan of live theater — not the big, fancy, Broadway stuff. I do that too, but I like live theater where you get to sit in the front row,” DiFranco explained. “I like seeing their faces, every gesture and expression. I like being that close and, in community theater, the whole audience is that close. That’s what I like. I like the real people aspect of it.”

From March to November, DiFranco collected hundreds of hours of footage from a dozen local venues — narrowed down from the 60-odd theaters from Oceanside to Sag Harbor, he said. Through the shooting and editing process, the filmmaker sought to answer one question.

“The story, for me, was, ‘Holy cow, look at all this hard work. It’s unbelievable how much work these people are doing, to put on something that lasts five, eight performances, and then it’s gone. It doesn’t exist any longer. Why are they working so hard and there’s no money in this?’” he said. “I needed to know the answer.”

More than 100 actors, directors, producers, playwrights, artistic directors, theater owners, stage crew and lobby personnel — from pre-teens to seniors — either weighed in or performed, sharing their passion for live drama from the inside out, said DiFranco, who …. while painting a picture of the towns that host them.

“I don’t want people to just be looking at actors and writers and directors. I want them to feel they’re getting a good piece of Long Island and what it really is – the history of the towns, the idiosyncrasies of the towns, their personalities, their geographies even,” said DiFranco, who lives in Northport. “I tried to give a nice picture of life on Long Island. It has nothing to do with Broadway. Community theater is not a tributary to Broadway, and it’s not an offshoot of Broadway. It’s a thing that grows out of the community itself.”

[caption id="attachment_75894" align="alignnone" width="1000"] A scene from "Play Time."[/caption]

It is a community he grew to know intimately, he said. Over the course of nine months, they let him into their world, granting him behind-the-scenes access that led to interviews that left him surprised and moved — “true moments,” he said.

“As a filmmaker, I’m very quiet and I ask provocative questions, and then I let them talk,” he said. “If you really listen, people say the most amazingly candid things. And then they start to say something that they never said to anybody before because they’re looking at you and you’re not just hearing it, you’re getting it. You’re understanding the emotion they’re talking about. And then they’ll say something very personal, very sensitive and brave.”

DiFranco understood them. And slowly, they began to answer the question he had been asking all along.

“It was the same reason why I make documentaries,” he said. “It’s a passion. You have to. You love it. You know how, you’ve learned, you have the skill, and you love it. And you can’t stop. That’s why you’re doing it. You’re not making any money, you’re spending money, but it doesn’t matter. This is something that somebody has to do, and you can, so you do it. And I saw that they were people just like me.

“Their devotion to it is out of love,” he continued. “We call them ‘amateurs,’ because that’s what that the word means. It means you love what you’re doing.”

His own experience writing “66 Candles” plays a small role in the film, he said, chronicling its journey from a serious play into a borderline farce — with guidance from some of the actors he met along the way.

“It was a personal play,” he said. “It was about the weirdly funny dimensions of entering old age. It has to happen to everybody, if you live long enough. You have to leave middle age and enter the next stage of life. And there’s something really absurd about it. I’m not trying to be funny, it just is funny.”

On a Sunday afternoon in October, DiFranco sat in the audience at the Oceanside Public Library, wondering what would happen. The 40 people surrounding him could have been a full house at a black box theater, he had mused. And when they laughed in all the spots they were supposed to laugh, it felt like one, he said.

“Anytime you undertake anything artistic, like making a film, I think it’s the same thing for making a play or being in a play: There has to be a huge amount of growth in you, just because you learn so much,” he said. “You might like going to plays, but after doing a film like this, now you actually really understand what a play is. I would say, you have no idea before that.”

“Play Time” will make its premiere on Friday, February 2, at 7 p.m. at the Vail-Leavitt Music Hall, located at 18 Peconic Avenue in Riverhead. Admission is free. For more information and a full list of events, please visit eastendfringefest.com.