California Stage opened its 20th Anniversary season with Kevin King’s Ovation Award winning play "The Idea Man.” King’s freshman play hits on a lot of great notes, some hysterically funny, some a realistic look about how large corporations use and, yes, abuse their human resources. California Sage has also done a great job in the casting of King’s characters. Right off, Loren Taylor gives a fascinating performance as Al Carson the man at the bottom of the rung in a manufacturing company. Carson is smart enough to figure out a way to reduce manufacturing costs by the millions. He is also smart enough to know that if he plays his card’s right he will get more than he is being offered, but

photographs by Barry Wisdom   Playwright Kevin King's career has had more moving parts than the Orwellian tool factory in which his award-winning dramedy "The Idea Man" is set. After earning a philosophy degree from the University of Michigan, King aborted plans for a master's degree ("I decided academia wasn't for me.") in favor of ricochet romances with journalism (he founded a pair of Detroit-based entertainment magazines, wrote film reviews, and freelanced features for a variety of publications, including The Sacramento Bee), documentary filmmaking ("Baker's and The Bird"), software engineering and tool-and-die mold-making. And all of this before penning "The Idea Man," which plays