Neal Weaver – Stage Raw
Playwright Debbie Bolsky set out to write a classic old-style madcap comedy, but what she produced is a singularly improbable farce.
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Now running through January 14
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw
Playwright Debbie Bolsky set out to write a classic old-style madcap comedy, but what she produced is a singularly improbable farce.
Read more…
Now running through January 14
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw
Playwright Sam Bobrick gained much of his early experience in the world of TV sitcoms, and that has left its mark. New York Water is a rather generic example of the genre — with cardboard characters and action largely dictated by neither plot nor character, but by the need to keep grinding out laugh lines. There’s not much concern with credibility or even probability. Read more…
Now running through December 17
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw
Premiering in 1976, this unique and unusual musical, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by John Weidman, and additional material by Hugh Wheeler, has no love story and no romantic ballads. Instead, it provides a lively impressionistic history of the Westernization of Japan, from 1853, when Commodore Perry opened up the isolated nation to world trade, to the present. Read more…
Now running through December 17
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw
This Cornerstone Production of Magic Fruit, written by Michael John Garces and directed by Shishir Kurup, is a dystopian fantasy, loosely based (oddly enough) on Mozart’s The Magic Flute. It asks the question, along with several others: Can we produce enough food to feed Earth’s ever-growing population without destroying the planet?
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Now running through December 11
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw
City Garage Theatre has been one of the more interesting companies in L.A., and their work has always been polished and professional. Director Frederique Michel and producer Charles Duncombe are good people. But over the years they have seemed to become more aggressively stylized in their work.
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Now running through December 17
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly
Set in 1986, Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yohen depicts the unraveling of a 37-year marriage. Although it tumbles off-track in its final third, the play to that point is an astute portrayal of the dynamics of a failed intimacy.
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Neal Weaver – Stage Raw
The title of Philip Kan Gotanda’s play, Yohen, refers to the unpredictable changes that take place when pottery is placed in the kiln. The result may be disastrous, or it may create an unexpected treasure. His play refers to the disruptive changes which occur in a human relationship over the course of years.
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Frances Baum Nicholson –The Stage Struck Review
Eighteen years ago, Danny Glover and the late Nobu McCarthy shared the stage of East West Players in Philip Kan Gotanda’s “Yohen,” about the struggles of an couple coming to terms with the husband’s retirement after 37 years in the military.
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Now running through November 19
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw
Playwright Tania Wisbar is the daughter of a German father and a Jewish mother, both of whom were prominent members of the German film world in the 1930s. But when she was just six months old, her parents divorced, and she and her mother fled German to escape the growing Nazi threat.
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Now running through November 19
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw
German playwright Wolfram Lotz’s play (translated by Daniel Brunet) is a zany satire on racism, racial stereotyping, and colonial attitudes in a supposedly post-colonial world. A farcical version of Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, via Apocalypse Now, it follows German Sergeant Oliver Pellner on a secret mission into the heart of Afghanistan, accompanied by his faithful aide, Stefan Dorsch (Ashley Steed).
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Now running through November 12
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw
Absence Makes the Heart… — written by Abley, and directed by Chrisanne Blankenship-Billings — is a modern take on Hans Christian Anderson’s The Red Shoes, which deals with a dancer driven to her death by the uncontrollable urge to dance.
Now running through October 29
Deborah Klugman – Capital & Main
This powerful drama by Alessandro Camon delves into the minds of two extraordinarily isolated people: a convict serving a life sentence for a murder he committed as a juvenile, and the mother of a police officer whose only son was shot and killed in the line of duty.
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Neal Weaver – Stage Raw
Playwright Alessandro Camon, an Oscar nominee for his screenplay for The Messenger, is deeply interested in the soul-destroying practice of solitary confinement, and in the experiences of crime survivors — people who lost loved ones to murder. He deals powerfully with both issues in this two-person play.
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Now running through October 22
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw
This play by Deborah Lawlor, co-founder of the Fountain Theatre, is perhaps a fictionalized personal memoir. It’s about Freddy Herko, a gifted young dancer and pianist, whose talent blazed in New York City’s avant-garde scene in the 1960s, only to be snuffed out by drug addiction. Herko died when he leapt naked from a fifth-floor window when he was only 28. Read more…
Now running through October 14
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw
The Upstairs Lounge was a lively and popular New Orleans gay bar till 1973, when an arsonist doused the stairs leading to the club with lighter fluid, set it aflame, and then rang the doorbell. In the ensuing blaze, 32 people were killed — mocked and ridiculed even in death, and refused burial by local churches because of their sexuality.
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Rob Stevens – Haines His Way
In an America divided more bitterly every day along racial, gender and sexual orientation lines, in an America where the President says that Nazis and White Supremacists are “fine people,” hate crimes and senseless acts of violence keep escalating.
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Now running through October 29