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Archive for Boston Court

COLLECTIVE RAGE at The Theatre at Boston Court

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Photo by Ed Kreiger

Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw

Collective Rage, whose poster features a gal with soft eyes, a flexed bicep and a clenched fist, is subtitled “a play in 5 boops” because all five characters are named Betty Boop, after the cartoon figure conceived by Max Fleischer in 1930. Read more…

Frances Baum Nicholson – The Daily Breeze

If a play intends to use cultural references in the course of its work, it probably makes sense to be sure that the audience will catch a clue as to what those references are. Read more…

Now running through March 19

MY BARKING DOG at the Theatre @ Boston Court

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Photo by Ed Krieger

Bob Verini  -   Stage Raw

Talk about your call of the wild! The atavistic urge – the impulse to fall in with nature in its most primitive state – is an old standby in drama and literature, and it’s now being applied to strong effect in My Barking Dog,  Eric Coble’s startling two-hander at the Theatre @ Boston Court. Read more…

Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly

Like Taste, Benjamin Brand’s recent play about a man driven to devour his own flesh, My Barking Dog by Eric Coble shocks and surprises, and in a most brilliant and entertaining way. Read more…

Dany Margolies  -  Arts In LA

What is an audience to make of characters who claim they’re telling the truth but who clearly are not doing so? This question comes to mind as Eric Coble’s poetic My Barking Dog turns increasingly metaphoric and untrue to life. Read more…

Sharon Perlmutter  -  Talkin’ Broadway

My Barking Dog is one of those plays that starts out relatively normally and ends up someplace unbelievable. I generally dig plays like this Read more…

Now running through May 24.

STUPID F—ING BIRD The Theater@at Boston Court

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Photo by Ed Krieger

Neal Weaver  – Stage Raw

People are always doing things to Chekhov. At least since the 1950s, when Joshua Logan reset The Cherry Orchard to the post-Civil War American South in a short-lived adaptation called The Wisteria Trees, the Russian playwright has been adapted, spoofed, satirized, de-constructed, re-conceived, re-thought, re-written and plagiarized. Chekhov Derivatives and Recycling has become a growth industry. Aaron Posner’s Stupid Fucking Bird is part of that movement, but it’s more interesting than most because, despite its departures from the original text, it remains, for most of its length, true in spirit to Chekhov. Read more…

Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter

The third Chekhov takeoff this year in Los Angeles (could I have missed any?), after The Country House and Vanya & Sonia & Masha & Spike, Stupid F—ing Bird may be the most self-consciously post-modern of the trio, with its resolutely present-day argot, deliberate ironic posturing and winking asides to the audience. Read more…

Steven Leigh Morris  – LA Weekly

In Anton Chekhov’s play The Seagull, about the theater and its ambiguous relationship to life, neurotic young playwright Konstantin Treplev speaks about the calcification of theater and of the necessity to create “new forms.” As Treplev ages, he evolves and devolves into a long-suffering, modestly successful author of quasi-inventive plays that might pretend to have new forms but actually don’t. Read more…

Now running through July 27.

R II at Boston Court

"R II"

Photo by Ed Krieger

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bob Verini – ArtsInLA

For R II, Jessica Kubzansky’s adaptation currently being performed at the Theater @ Boston Court, Shakespeare’s Richard II has lost not just six letters from its title but also about 25 percent of its text and upwards of 90 percent of the ensemble usually assembled to perform it. In R II, John Sloan portrays the titular monarch, with Jim Ortlieb and Paige Lindsey White on call to stand in as everyone else.
And as it happens, all of this reduction is to the good.

Read more…

Steven Leigh Morris  – LA Weekly

Theater @ Boston Court’s program to its production of R II — what might otherwise be called William Shakespeare‘s Richard II — makes a point of not referring to the dramatist’s work as a play but rather as a text. This is almost as telling as the announcement, in that same program, that the production employing this text has been “conceived, adapted and directed” by Jessica Kubzansky. Read more…

Now running through October 13.

ALCESTIS at The Theatre @ Boston Court

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Photo by Ed Krieger

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bob Verini – ArtsInLA

Director-writer Nancy Keystone doesn’t exactly crank ‘em out quickly through her Critical Mass Performance Group, but they sure are worth the waiting for. Her 2006 Theatre @ Boston Court staging of Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play made keen sense out of that peculiarly remote text, and now, with Alcestis, Keystone and her team have created a completely involving, scintillating take on Euripides for our time.
Read more…

David C. Nichols – LA Times

The ancient Greek myth about Alcestis and her self-sacrifice for her spouse has seen countless versions over the centuries, from Euripides and John Milton to Handel, Gluck and Thornton Wilder. It receives a tart postmodern spin in “Alcestis” at Boston Court Performing Arts Center in Pasadena.   Read more…

 

Steven Leigh Morris  – LA Weekly

The world of shadows also informs Alcestis, a new work based on Euripides‘ play, presented by Critical Mass Performance Group and Theatre @ Boston Court. This world premiere was developed last year in a laboratory at the Getty Center, and its theatrical examination of the intersection of death and marriage is among the highlights of the current local season.  Read more…

Now running through July 28.

AMERICAN MISFIT at Boston Court

Photo by Ed Krieger

Photo by Ed Krieger

 

AMERICAN MISFIT by Dan Dietz.

Bob Verini – ArtsInLA.com

It’s easy to describe the formal aspects of Dan Dietz’s “American Misfit,” a world premiere at the Theatre @ Boston Court. Its meaning proves a much bigger headscratcher.  Read more…