The Neighborhood Crime Watch

Lonny Chapman Group Repertory Theatre ("LCGRT") presents The Neighborhood Crime Watch – a seven character farce written by Craig Alpaugh and directed by Richard Alan Woody.

When two bungling burglars attempt to break and enter a house in Canoga Park early one evening and discover that a Neighborhood Crime Watch Meeting is about to take place, panic and chaos ensues. Suddenly pretending to be meeting attendees, the two thieves Ronald and Donald run headlong into Lisa – the local florist who owns the house, Mona – her loud-mouthed neighbor, Father Bob – a sweet but slightly over-sexed Catholic Priest, Officer Betty Bybee – a lady cop who is willing to do her duty and little else – and Myron Teppleman – a madcap therapist who could use a little of his own therapy. There are mistaken identities, bold lies, door-slamming physical comedy, the inevitable young lovers, the not so inevitable older lovers, an unexpected reunion and a happy ending, of course.

“What’s so funny about a Neighborhood Crime Watch,” you ask? Everything, according to the late playwright Craig Alpaugh. Take seven eccentric characters and turn them upside down in a house in the San Fernando Valley, and you’ve got farce. Craig makes light of cops, priests, pornography, postal, telephone and DMV workers. Craig was a long-time actor and resident playwright at LCGRT where the play debut in a successful production in 1990.