A roundup in photos of Santa Barbara Theater productions in November. First up: Out of the Box Theater Company’s latest foray in to the land of out there musicals brought a fully realized adaptation of Bret Eaton Ellis’s story of a (maybe) serial killer on a spree in Wall Street, dripped with satire about the unbridled expressions of vanity, greed, drugs and all the other good stuff so emblematic of the go-go ’80s. Out at UCSB, two fine plays were mounted as the Theater and Dance Department embarks on their 2019-20 season, beginning with this year’s Launchpad premiere of a new play, Enid Graham’s “What Martha Did,” a deep dive into a troubled family as they discover new truths about each other and come to grips with the legacy of the suicide of Martha soon after she published what became a best-selling book of poems. The final play in this trio, “The White Card,” by Claudia Rankine, takes a hard look at white privilege and assumptions during the course of a dinner party honoring an African American photographer put on by white patrons of the visual arts. Sparks flew aplenty in all three of these fine productions, and Santa Barbara area theater-goers were once again given a wealth of choices to see live theater.
