Photo by Son of Semele
Terry Morgan - Stage Raw
James Joyce in his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man famously wrote, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” That sentiment describes a lot of historical fiction, in which the sins of the past reverberate endlessly down decades or centuries into the present. Read more…
Now running through June 17
(Photo by Mainak Dhar)
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw
In Archipelago, Caridad Svinch spins a love story about a man and a woman from two different cultures, and sets it against a backdrop of war and apocalyptic upheaval. Director Barbara Kallir oversees an attractive and imaginative staging, but the vagueness of the play’s dramatic events and the absence of detail in the characters’ accounts of themselves make for an enervating narrative. Read more…
Now running through June 18
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw
Bekah Brunstetter’s newest play is about brothers: what it means to live with a sibling you’re not compatible with, and what it’s like to long for one who may not exist. Read more…
Now running through December 14.
Photo by Matthew McCray
Margaret Gray – LA Times
Son of Semele Ensemble has selected two startlingly different short plays for “Woman Parts,” a double bill planned, according to the program, as a corrective to the underrepresentation of women in the theater.
The first offering, “Sex & God,” by the Scottish playwright Linda McLean, weaves together melancholy monologues by four women from different periods of the 20th century: in 1905 (Betsy Moore), 1935 (Melina Bielefelt), 1965 (Sarah Rosenberg) and 1995 (Hilletje Bashew). These women tell their stories in alternating, impressionistic fragments (in dialects coached by Ruth Connell) that evoke four instruments in counterpoint.
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw
It’s hard to imagine two more dissimilar plays than Linda McLean’s Sex and God and Sibyl O’Malley’s Lamentations of the Pelvis, which together make up a feminist themed double-header at Son of Semele Ensemble. Written and directed by women, they share a female focus but are otherwise as stylistically different as any two works can be.
Now running through May 19.