There was no big announcement, press release, leaks or fanfare. It just appeared. As if it had always been there. 


But Hartnell College Western Stage’s new theater group, 2x4Bash: Theatre on the Edge, set to launch its inaugural season this weekend, had a definite birth. It came from longtime WS artistic director Jon Selover, last October.


“[Jon’s] big idea,” says 2x4 member Melissa Woodrow, “was to get younger professionals designing and creating shows on our own.”


There were other ideas: to do something different that would get younger audiences into the seats. 


Made up of about 30 Hartnell College students, interns, staff and stage vets, the autonomous and oven-fresh company is lightly steered by Selover, with a core group of seven Western Stage student alums like Woodrow, collectively called the Uber Group, heading different parts of the four repertory plays they’ll put on in seven weeks. Why so many so fast? 


“That’s part of the challenge to them,” Selover says. “Nothing is more important than to find and train the people who are going to run [Western Stage] going forward. And I started in repertory. It’s a baptism of fire. It keeps things focused.”


That’s a good way to put it because 2x4 is keenly focused on cultivating a young, loyal following for edgier fare, as in the examples set by, according to Woodrow, SF Playhouse and Seattle’s ACT Contemporary Theater. The four plays they’re cramming into their short “second shadow season,” as Selover calls it, are written by freshly relevant and modern playwrights, with all four stories orbiting around young people’s lives.


Their first play – each one runs about five times – is Jenny Lyn Bader’s None of the Above (7:30pm Friday), which pits a spoiled teenage girl who lives on the Upper East Side of New York against an SAT tutor who thinks he knows all. 


The second show, playing 7:30pm the next day, is David Mamet’s Oleanna, a two-person drama about political correctness and sexual harassment between a teacher and a student. The final two, touching down next week and next month, are Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things and Bert V. Royal’s Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead.


As if the content shift wasn’t enough, the company “makes things more accessible” by pricing their tickets cheaper than usual ($5-$10). But the big experiment here is on Saturdays: 2x4 invites up to 10 audience members to Tweet and Facebook the show live, as it’s happening, to “feel it in the moment,” Woodrow says. “We want to know what you’re thinking.”


Woodrow admits, however, that the immediacy and visibility of live blogging might throw the actors off-balance. And will folks feel “in the moment” if they’re engaged in the blogosphere? But that’s what experimentation and teaching, two pillars of 2x4, are about.


“I’ve been in the company for 25 years,” Selover says. “This is my 10th year as artistic director. It seemed like a good time to do something different.”


Though Selover hand picked the plays, the Uber Group and the directors, he says he’s been hands-off from there, letting the young company do its own lighting, tech, rehearsal, marketing, meetings, online presence and more. That live Tweeting/Facebooking thing alone… that’s vanguard stuff, positioning the company, to borrow a term from the Monterey Jazz Festival, as a possible “next generation” of theater. 


Is that a good place to be? We’ll see if 2x4 gets bashed in this new arena, or uses new ideas to build something special. 


2x4Bash: Theatre on the Edge opens its inaugural season 7:30pm Friday and Saturday, at Hartnell College’s Western Stage Studio Theatre, 411 Cental Ave., Salinas. $5/student; $10/general; $20/all-access Bash card; RSVP for Tweet and Facebook slots. 755-6818, www.2x4bash.com.