The Fest Begins!

In Korbel III: The Birth the only industry left in the town was a company that dug a deep hole in the ground and dumped stuff into it. “Nobody knew what was going into the hole, but it was a business, and it was in Korbel,” so it was accepted. Until people noticed that no babies had been born since the company came to town. But Dorothy Dugan returned from the dead (as she had in Korbel II), to miraculously cause people to give birth. “We gave little water balloons to people in the audience, and everybody was giving birth — including her son.”

That installment ran nearly a decade ago, and the series seemed to have run its course with what Fields admits was its weakest script. But several factors converged to bring Korbel back this summer. For one thing, there were local events that begged to become part of the saga, like the ongoing drama of Blue Lake’s disgraced police chief, the continuing transformations associated with the Blue Lake Casino, and the rise of the marijuana grow house economy. “Kevin Hoover wrote a long article about grow houses in the Arcata Eye awhile back, and suggested in it that Dell’Arte should do a play about it,” Fields said. “The last line of the article was: ‘Are you reading, Michael?’”

But another impetus came from an unlikely source: the Campaign for Love and Forgiveness by the Fetzer Institute, and a series of local forums on the subject sponsored by KEET. The Dell’Arte School hosted one of the sessions, so Fields attended. Eventually he went to all of them, and realized there was dramatic material there. “It seemed fitting to do it as a Korbel piece, because it has a past, and forgiveness is a lot about holding onto something or letting it go. You can’t change what happened, but how do you move on? There’s a great quote — I think it was Confucius: ‘Forgiveness doesn’t change the past, but it enlarges the future.’”

(Actually, Dutch botanist Paul Boese said that, but Confucius does have a great quote on the subject: “Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it forgoes revenge and dares to forgive an injury.”)

The question now is, as Fields recognizes, “if comedy and the theme of forgiveness can exist at the same time.” We’ll all get a chance to find out, starting June 26, with the premiere of Korbel IV: The Accident. The emergency room of Korbel’s new for-profit hospital and casino, St. Mo’s (she’s the patron saint of gamblers) is suddenly filled with victims of an accident when a mysterious taco truck driven by the police chief and filled with machine guns runs over several people. But since every second home in Korbel is now a grow house and uses seven times the power a normal home uses, there’s a blackout — only enough power at St. Mo’s to run three life support systems (and of course the slot machines) — but there are four criticals: so somebody has to die!

There are plenty of local references, Dorothy’s obligatory return from the dead and, especially, lots of songs by a trio of nurses played by three of the best-known singers around: Joyce Hough, Jayse Lecyour and Lila Nelson. The cast features original Dell’Arte ensemble members Joan Schirle, Michael Fields and Donald Forrest, and local all-stars Jackie Dandeneau and David Ferney, Bob and Lynne Wells, as well as Jane Hill, Lynnie Horrigan, Soren Olsen, Josh Salas and Calder Johnson. Fields promises a spectacular stage set, designed by HSU’s Jody Sekas: “It’s what Vegas would look like if it came to your hospital.”

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