The waiting is over

COSTA MESA ? A week ago, Estancia High School debuted this year’s student-written sketch comedy show, “Waiting for Hurwitz.” On Thursday evening, at its fourth performance, the play took on an unexpected twist.

Hurwitz showed up.

Every year, Pauline Maranian’s drama students put together a two-hour revue of sketches, songs and dances that skewer both modern culture and school life. This time, the show has an unusual premise, as the characters have invited TV writer Mitch Hurwitz ? a 1981 Estancia graduate and the author of the school’s first sketch revue ? to attend their performance. Needless to say, he never arrives.

On Thursday, though, the school held a special show for alumni of its theater department and invited Hurwitz. It was a rare case of life imitating art; until minutes before curtain time, the cast wasn’t sure if he would make it. In the end, though, the creator of the TV comedy series “Arrested Development” came out and took a bow ? giving “Waiting for Hurwitz” a one-time happy ending.

“It felt presumptuous to go,” Hurwitz said. “The whole purpose of the play is that I never show up. Godot never showed up. Guffman never showed up. But I’m so glad I came.”

Both of the works Hurwitz cited were inspirations for the Estancia show. In Samuel Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot,” a pair of drifters stands in the middle of nowhere awaiting a mysterious stranger; Christopher Guest’s comedy “Waiting for Guffman” concerns a small-town theater troupe that unsuccessfully invites a New York critic to its show.

Likewise, “Waiting for Hurwitz” opens with a group of students onstage, fretting over whether their famous alum will attend the evening’s performance. At the end, after the sketches have concluded, the cast sets a chair on the stage with Hurwitz’s name on it ? misspelled ? and the lights go down with the seat still empty.

In between, the cast pays tribute to Hurwitz in another way. In 1981, the future scriptwriter started an Estancia tradition by writing “Wet Paint,” a “Saturday Night Live”-style program of short, fast sketches that captured every aspect of students’ daily lives. Since then, the school’s drama department has followed in Hurwitz’s footsteps every year ? except for the targets of satire, which change all the time.

A short sampling of sketches in “Waiting for Hurwitz”: parodies of “CSI,” “E! True Hollywood Story,” the pop group ‘NSync, cellphone networks, Spider-Man, Harry Potter and “The Bachelor.” The humor in the show ranges from the local (a mock commercial for an Estancia security guard training college) to the political (a parody of the United Nations in which each country is depicted as a mischievous child).

“We just try to take things going on at school or on TV ? anything current that people watching the show would understand,” said senior Sage O’Toole, 17, one of the show’s cast members. “We’re a completely original show. If anything has ever been done before, we can’t do it.”

Maranian, who has taught drama at Estancia for 10 years, said she sometimes had to scramble to keep up with her students’ ideas.

“A lot of them, they’re not as funny to me until I understand why,” she said. “There are two ‘Sweet 16’ sketches, and I thought they were funny because the kids were performing them, but I didn’t know there was a TV show called ‘Sweet 16.’ ”

“Waiting for Hurwitz” holds its final performance at 7:30 p.m. today in the Estancia theater, and the show may end with an empty chair again this time. Still, Hurwitz, who had never returned to his alma mater to view a show since graduating, gave the production a favorable notice. Sketch comedy, he said, was a difficult craft, and the students pulled it off well.

“It’s a very short form, it’s very tough to end a sketch, and it’s hard to know even what a sketch is,” Hurwitz explained. “Is it just a parody of a commercial, like on ‘Saturday Night Live’? It’s a hard medium to be original in.”