With the yearly holiday hustle and bustle behind us, it’s time to move on to one of northeast Indiana’s favorite pastimes: complaining that there’s nothing to do around here in January. 

If you’re looking for a rebuttal to those complaints, Arena Dinner Theatre is here to help with their three-week run of the play The Last Quiz Night on Earth from Jan. 17-Feb. 1 at their intimate historic venue at 719 Rockhill St. in the West Central neighborhood.

Unique theater experience

Live dinner theater is a singular experience, one in which you can expect to enjoy a delicious meal with a table full of strangers, then enjoy a live production together with your new friends. This production takes it a step further, bringing an English pub to life and inviting the audience in to its homey confines. 

I recently sat with director Emily Caudill and got a very early look at the first scenes during a rehearsal.

“If you want a different theater experience than a normal amphitheater or Broadway show, it is a fantastic experience to have because of the intimacy you have with being so close to the actors on the stage,” she said of the closeness of the dinner theater format. “You can really see and feel their emotions.”

Meet the characters

Even at a rehearsal well ahead of opening night, you could already feel that closeness. 

Pub owner Kathy, portrayed with an appealing mix of kindness and spirit by Emily Schwartz Keirns, starts the action with a warm welcome to the pub’s regulars — including the Arena audience themselves. 

Kathy’s introduction sets the stage right away: There’s a meteor. It’s going to strike Earth and kill everyone within a matter of hours. As long as humanity is doomed, we might as well proceed with this week’s pub trivia event and end it all in a comfortable place with friends. 

As a member of the audience, you are now one of those friends. And yes, you can play along once the trivia starts.

Next, we meet Rav, the quizmaster for the event. Played by Travis Gerardot with a reassuring presence and firm confidence in his gaming skills, Rav has found a comfortable structure in the format of pub trivia, and he intends to make everyone’s last night feel familiar and reassuring. 

“One of my favorite lines is when Rav says that he just wanted to feel love in his heart,” Caudill said. “And (he) wanted to be loved by someone. It’s such a great line in that moment. Everyone in their lives has that moment.”

Neither of the protagonists are fully prepared for what comes next: First a visit from Kathy’s estranged brother Bobby, played by Duke Roth. Bobby arrives unexpectedly and balances Kathy’s quiet desperation with some very noisy desperation as their final hours approach.

Next comes an even more unexpected visitor: Fran, played by Megan Gerig, appears from out of Rav’s past with a secret. Time is short and she has little time to act. Gerig makes Fran feel simultaneously impulsive and focused, driven by the secret she needs to share.

Comedy that gets real

Even with a modestly sized cast, the play covers a lot of ground, touching on themes of success and failure, family and commitment, love and infatuation, and how to face one’s inevitable end.

Caudill’s direction balances the dark humor of the hopeless situation along with the genuine emotions that arise as the clock ticks down, marked by the rounds of pub trivia that intersperse the action. 

“It’s about realizing what makes a family a family, and making the realization that it’s courageous to fail,” she said. “It’s OK to not be as successful as you thought you would be, but you have little successes, which is great as well. It’s about realizing that we are here, and we are enough.

“It does get very emotional. I see it as a dramedy. A little bit of drama, a little bit of comedy in there. It really is kind of intense sometimes and very real. The arguments and relationships are very real things that a lot of people experience.”

As we were wrapping up, Caudill talked about Arena Dinner Theatre.

“If you want to be able to get away from your real life and have a moment of a little bit of clarity, especially with things that are happening in the world today… theater is that escape,” she said. “To be able to feel some else’s emotions other than yours is a great experience.

“And just to be able to be surrounded by people who are like-minded, that’s one thing I love about theater, especially Arena Dinner Theatre. The people in the cast and on the production team are the greatest people to be around. 

“I’m super-excited to have this experience with them.”