By: Mike Leonor
Entertainment Writer
Are you looking for something new to watch that isn’t a limited series having lawyers twerk for your amusement? Catch the original sitcom that was produced, written, and shot by your own Chabot staff and students. The full play was directed and showrun by Chabot professor Linda Amayo-Hassan. Along with the students in the play, Professor Linda has written about the life of college students all hanging out at their own fictional coffee shop named “The Bay Bay Cafe.”
This production is 3 episodes with a full star-studded cast. It showcases its own original characters facing the trials of college academic life and how it affects their personal lives. All the staff at “The Bay Bay Cafe” are students that play Chabot College students from their interpersonal relationships to the friendships they make at this cafe. Each character has a story and lesson that may be similar to your own experience or journey. Stories Co-written by the students here at the school performed and acted so you can vicariously see and feel what they may have experienced.
This series sitcom project took a whole 6 weeks from the writers room all the way to filming production. “The Bay Bay Cafe” crew was outstanding in producing and creating something within the limited time schedules. To produce this sitcom at a televised level it took the work and effort of both the Theater department and Television studio here at Chabot to revamp the space of the 1200 buildings small theater to look like a fullfeldge off-site television studio.
Professor Linda Amayo-Hassan stated “ Sujoy Sarkar (Senior Technician) and I are trying to do more filming and projects with the theater and Television station. Prior to this work we had already done podcasts about theater two or three different podcasts or recordings that just seemed to make up the stories for this play and other projected works. This opened up an opportunity for me to take a more active role in the writing, overseeing, and carefully shaping the work.” From podcast dialog to being written down as a script from finally being shot and produced it is nice to see a project go off the ground floor from being an idea and becoming a full fledged recorded sitcom.
The people that helped produce this project want you as a student to hear their stories about academic life as a student living here in the bay area. They also want you to understand an international student’s perspective making their way through a new environment. This sitcom is the first performance by some of our Chabot students so make sure to show some support and watch “The Bay Bay Cafe” when it premieres on November 24 and 25 on Youtube or on Comcast Channel 27.
