The California State University, Bakersfield theatre department will be presenting its senior projects on Tuesday (Nov. 21) at 7 p.m. in the Arena Theater. This quarter's single project will be by Robert Chan, who is studying playwriting. Admission to this event is free and open to the public.

Chan's project is a one-act staged reading satirizing the "Prussian Blue" music duo that was booked and later booted off the ticket at the 2005 Kern County Fair because of their racial overtones. Chan hopes this provocative topic will elicit discussion.

"The play is called 'Vice' and it is a comedy about the rise and fall of a band loosely based on Prussian Blue, the white supremacist group~from Tehachapi," Chan said.

"The piece is filled with all manner of horrible racial epithets and thoroughly distasteful behavior, but it's not intended as 'shock comedy.' Rather, I am interested in the gap between perception of self and reality; the humor I hope to elicit is not from the things people say, but from the distance between what they say and what they do.

"This sort of work is intended to be confrontational, but it is my desire to draw genuine laughter from an uncomfortable situation rather than the other way around," Chan said.

For more information, please contact the theatre department at (661) 654-3093.

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