A Conversation with Alan Adelson & Kate Taverna

This year, though, an unexpected connection pushed it to the top of his list: Mike Aronson, the founder of the Readers’ Theatre company at the Majestic, also is an admirer. Out of the blue, he asked Elliott to direct it.

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Coincidence? Fate? A random occurrence? Does it matter? Elliott said yes, and the play will be presented this weekend as the latest online Readers' Theatre production.

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Dietz has said that This Random World is about “the life that is happening maybe just beside your own life. … The missed opportunities or the chance thing that might have happened today (or) may not have happened today. Only from the outside do we see we other people’s missed opportunities; we can rarely see our own.”

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The play follows the intersecting lives of seven characters and explores not just the connections between them, but also how easy it is sometimes to miss a connection. The characters, Elliott said, “never ask the right questions. That’s how life actually works; in life, we don’t always ask the right questions.”

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Those characters include Scottie, an aging mother who’s determined to protect her independence, and her caretaker, Bernadette. Scottie’s children, Beth and Tim, don’t know everything about their mother — in particular, they’re in the dark about her avid travel. Beth herself has a touch of wanderlust and journeys to Nepal during the play. The plot also involves two sisters seeking common ground and an internet prank gone awry. A reviewer for The New York Times called the play a “modest but affecting comedy-drama.”

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Elliott said he knows he wants to direct a play when he’s reading it “and suddenly I can see the staging,” and that was the case when he first read This Random World.

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To help bring Dietz’s characters to life, the director assembled an ensemble that’s filled with mid-valley theater veterans, including Michael Wren, Harriett Owen Nixon, Charlotte J. Headrick, and Don Taco. Arlee Olson, Danyelle Tinker, and Michaela Lonning round out the cast.

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Dietz is among the United States’ most prolific playwrights, and two of his other works, Bloomsday and Becky’s New Car, have been staged recently in the mid-valley. Dietz bounces around genres — he’s written political plays, comedies, and thrillers — and, in that regard, he’s a bit like Elliott, whose directing efforts for the Majestic haven’t fit into a single category. (Recent credits include Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls and an adaptation of Joan Didion’s wrenching The Year of Magical Thinking.)

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