Spreckels stages world premiere of new play

Playwright Deborah Yarchun’s dark comedy, “Atlas, the Lonely Gibbon,” has never been produced onstage before, although the script was a finalist in competition last year at the National Playwrights Conference.

That will change this weekend with the Spreckels theatre company’s world-premiere production of the play. It’s one of four plays by Yarchun that will be produced in the U.S. and Canada this year.

The 35-year-old playwright, who moved from New York to Los Angeles just before the COVID-19 pandemic, spent most of July in Sonoma County, working with the cast of four actors and director Sheri Lee Miller, manager of Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park.

“It’s exciting to be in the room with everyone working on the play. There’s nothing better as a playwright,” she said. “When you see the play on its feet, with actors, you see some things differently. I realized there wasn’t a lot more I can do with the play until I saw a production, with actors interacting.”

Yarchun’s premise for “Atlas, the Lonely Gibbon” is intriguing. The heroine, Irene, is a young journalist, working from home and reduced to editing articles generated by artificial intelligence.

Her husband is a cybercrime journalist, a niche that has kept him employed in a shrinking industry. He introduces unwelcome technologies into their home to generate stories, and now, even their refrigerator has an attitude.

Irene seeks solace in a virtual-reality show about Atlas, a solitary ape at a monkey sanctuary.

“I often write about the isolated and displaced,” Yarchun explained. “I think we tend to write about things that terrify and fascinate us. I would say this play explores the possibility of being lonely in a wired world.”

Yarchun doesn’t really know how many plays she’s written.

“I stopped counting,” she said. “I started writing plays in the seventh grade, and I had written 28 by the time I was 18. Then I decided it was quality, not quantity.”

In her adult career, she has had a string of her plays performed at universities and theaters around the country.

The Spreckels cast of “Atlas, the Lonely Gibbon” features Keith Baker, Kevin Bordi, Julianne Bradbury and Taylor Diffenderfer.

The theater will host free discussions with the playwright after every Saturday performance.

Yarchun landed with the Spreckels theater company after a chance meeting at the Pacific Playwrights Festival in Costa Mesa with David Templeton, Sonoma County playwright and community editor of the Petaluma Argus-Courier.

“I was attending a reading by a colleague of mine, and David and I met at a party and started talking,” she recalled.

Through Templeton, Yarchun connected with Miller at Spreckels.

“It has been a fantastic collaboration,” Yarchun said. “Sheri read a lot of my plays and chose this one.”

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5243. On Twitter @danarts.