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If you caught “Tea with Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice” at The Bembridge House this past May, you may recall a delightful tea service followed by an abridged version of Shakespeare’s play set throughout the historic Queen Anne-style Victorian home.
The same team is staging another immersive theatrical experience at the 120-year-old house beginning this weekend, along with a full tea service complete with scones, finger sandwiches and tartlets.
There’s no Shakespeare this time, rather a set of three, one-act plays featuring mostly women called “Riders to the Sea & Some Silly Acts for Thee.” Each play is staged in a different part of the home.
“This show of three distinct one-acts connects three very different generations and lifestyles all dealing with common themes of survival, family, traditions, property, grief, death and perhaps a little something extra,” said Michael Taber, the show’s producer and director.
The first mini-play — staged in front of the home as the audience sips tea under shade trees — is “Riders to the Sea,” a tragic play by Irish playwright J.M. Synge set on the remote Isle of Inishmaan in the 1890s, about a mother and her two daughters losing all the men in their lives to the ocean.
Taber describes it as an “earthy and turbulent” story that’s “filled with the essence of a Celtic people known for their superstitions and foresight, intertwined with the Catholic beliefs imposed upon them.”
Audiences then go inside the home to be teleported to 1920s England for Pat Wilson’s dark comedy “A Funeral Tea,” in which a caterer finds herself serving tea after a cremation — except the urn with ashes is missing, and the tea tastes rather strange.
“Who knew [the deceased] Jacob Starkie and who is attending out of obligation or pure entertainment?” Taber describes. “Be prepared to drink the tea and immerse yourself in the absurdity of a reception like no other.”
Finally, audiences can enjoy the Bembridge backyard while experiencing the final one-act play, A.F. Groff’s ironic comedy “Not My Cup of Tea,” set in the 1960s.
“Two sisters try to come up with the most efficient way to put their sweet, darling mother out of her misery,” Taber describes. “Will they succeed, and how will dear mother take it?”
The concept of staging three one-acts was inspired by the film “The Hours,” Taber said, in which stories with women from three different eras are woven into a single narrative.
“Three different stories are told in different time periods,” he said of the Bembridge House plays. “Yet all have a throughline dealing with death and the rules and roles society has placed on women in and around it.”
Traditionally, in the worlds of these plays, the elderly leave belongings to their sons. Only this time, it is the young men who leave the old behind, Taber said.
“I wanted to direct the pieces as rooted in the reality of the various time periods with extremely high stakes to give audiences a chance to be transported to another perspective of living, with an edge of dark humor,” Taber said.
Taber himself joins his troupe of five actresses collectively called The Unscene Players — Elena Johnson, Hannah McMullen, Marge Packman, Chelsea Sykes and Catalina Tan — in bringing these three stories to life.
“My hope is that through the contrast of costumes, props and language, audiences will get the feeling of time-traveling while also gaining insight through the vignettes and their characters,” Taber said.
“Tea with ‘Riders to the Sea & Some Silly Acts for Thee’” runs Sept. 10 to 20, with lower-priced evening-tea shows Thursdays at 7 p.m. and afternoon tea-service shows on Saturdays and Sundays at 1 p.m. and 4 p.m., at The Bembridge House, 953 N. Park Circle, Long Beach. For tickets and information, visit TheBembridgeHouse.org. Run time is two hours.