Arts Around Redmond: RHS Graduate Helms Two Plays at SecondStory Repertory

When you’re writing a story about a vampire, there are plenty of stereotypes to watch out for. For Thomas Constantine Moore, writer and director of vampire play Bare, the best solution was to deal with them head on.

“When you use a cliché, you need to know why you’re using it,” he said. “(You) avoid unconsciously falling into the stereotypes.”

Bare, a one-act play, and Stone Sheep, a 10-minute comedy also written and directed by Moore, will stage at 7 p.m. Aug. 8 and 9 at . The productions are part of the One Summer Theater Company, which Moore founded this summer.

A graduate, he’s currently studying acting at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and the plays are keeping his theater sensibilities active during the break. Starring in the productions are fellow RHS alumni and a Redmond High senior.

“Bare” tells the story of a young woman who’s kidnapped a vampire and tied him up in her basement. Familiar with all of the pop cultural depictions of vampires, she’s surprised by what she encounters.

The play eschews the supernatural elements of most vampiric lore, both for practical reasons and because Moore wanted to focus on the human aspects of a vampire, he said.

“I was struggling with how to make a vampire stage-worthy,” he said. “They usually represent human desire, especially sexual desire—that itself is a very stage-worthy theme.”

Mind games abound in the play, with a power struggle that plays out in unexpected ways.

“I wanted to see how much power I could give to a character tied up at the beginning,” Moore said.

The evening will begin with Stone Sheep, a 10-minute play that Moore wrote for a playwriting class in college. It’s a comedy, but an emotionally complex one about two friends confronting the nature of their relationship.

“(They’re) broaching a serious subject and trying to keep from being too serious about it,” Moore said. “People do this a lot—they approach things (in a way) to minimize damage.”

The class-imposed requirement for the play was to either follow the structure of a famous story or actually tell the story itself within the play. Stone Sheep does both, drawing its inspiration from Aesop’s The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Working with no budget and simply a group of friends who are all excited about being there has been an even more rewarding experience than anticipated, Moore said. Now, he’s looking forward to giving people the opportunity to see shows that have never been staged anywhere before.

Tickets for the One Summer Theater Company performances are available online or at SecondStory’s box office in .