Community News

Irvine Theater Company presents six world-premiere plays

 

by: David Ihrig
Published: October 12, 2026

 

IRVINE...Irvine Theater Company will present six world-premiere short plays in Is Ignorance Bliss?: What We Pretend Not to Notice, performing Nov. 6–7 and Nov. 13–14 at Canvas in Irvine.

As a civic theater, Irvine Theater Company develops original work around questions and experiences that resonate within its community. For this festival, members of ITC’s Brain Based Collective were invited to create plays exploring one question: What do we pretend not to notice?

The resulting stories move from artificial intelligence and office romance to dating, parenting, family identity and food-fueled paranoia. Together, they examine the understandings people quietly maintain so they can continue functioning as families, organizations, cultures and communities.

“Human beings depend upon shared stories about who we are and how our families, workplaces and institutions operate,” said David Ihrig, artistic director and founder of Irvine Theater Company. “Sometimes functioning together requires us to soften a contradiction, leave something unsaid or behave as though we accept an explanation we privately question.”

Ihrig continues. “These plays ask what our shared pretenses protect, why we participate in them and what happens when ignoring something begins to cost more than acknowledging it.”
The six plays are:

• How May I Help You?
• Between Colleagues and Confessions
• Bite the Hand
• Parental Guidance Suggested
• It’s Not You, It’s Me
• Metathesiophobia

In How May I Help You?, today’s leading artificial-intelligence assistants become human employees of an advice hotline, each certain that its approach is the correct one. Other plays follow coworkers insisting they are “just colleagues,” a serial dater confronted with his own favorite breakup line, a mother who can rationalize almost anything her teenage son does, a young woman overwhelmed by everything the internet says she should not eat, and a family struggling to acknowledge a daughter’s relationship.

The collection moves between comedy and drama, finding humor in the explanations people construct to preserve relationships, maintain order and avoid uncomfortable change.

All six works were developed through the Brain Based Collective, where writers, actors and directors collaborate on original stories through a process informed by contemporary understandings of attention, memory and human behavior. Four playwrights return from ITC’s first short-play festival, Disconnected: The Stories We Stand to Lose, and two first-time playwrights join the festival this year.
The production continues ITC’s cinematic-theater style, combining live performance with changing visual environments to carry audiences between six distinct story worlds.

Performance Information
Friday, Nov. 6 at 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, Nov. 7 at 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
Friday, Nov. 13 at 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, Nov. 14 at 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
Venue:
Canvas
17332 Von Karman Avenue, Suite 115
Irvine, California
Tickets: $25
Tickets and additional information are available at:
https://irvinetheatercompany.com/tickets

About Irvine Theater Company
Irvine Theater Company develops and produces original theatrical work in response to the interests, experiences and questions of the community it serves. Through productions, artist-development programs and community partnerships, ITC is building opportunities for playwrights, actors, directors and theater artists to create professional work in Irvine.