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Archive for Capital and Main – Page 2

AN ENEMY OF THE PUEBLO at Casa 0101

Photo by Ed Krieger

Photo by Ed Krieger

Deborah Klugman – Capital & Main

In An Enemy of the Pueblo, playwright Josefina López appropriates the basic construct of Henrik Ibsen’s classic, tosses in a few large dollops of magical realism, and transforms the lead character from a 19th-century Norwegian doctor into a 21st-century Mexican curandera. The result is a stirring adaptation that features a luminous Zilah Mendoza as an earthy, compassionate, albeit flawed, woman of principle.
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Now running through November 12

 

THIS LAND at Company of Angels

(Photo: Grettel Cortes Photography)

(Photo: Grettel Cortes Photography)

Deborah Klugman – Capital & Main

Early on in Evangeline Ordáz’s engaging and arrestingly mounted historical melodrama, an altercation ensues between Toya (Cheryl Umaña), a proud and angry Indian princess, and Enrique (Jeff Torres) the amiable son of a Mexican landowner. The year is 1843 and the issue is water……

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Now running through November 13

 

TURN ME LOOSE at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

(Photo by Lawrence K. Ho)

(Photo by Lawrence K. Ho)

Deborah Klugman – Capital & Main

In his powerhouse performance as Dick Gregory, the stand-up comic who rose to fame in the 1960s, Joe Morton tells the following story: He was civil rights organizing in the South with his good friend Medgar Evers, when he received a call informing him that his infant son had died.
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Dany Margolies – The Daily News

On the first page of her script titled “Turn Me Loose,” Gretchen Law introduces the piece as “a full-length play for stage, from the life and works of Mr. Dick Gregory.” The play retains this purposeful yet respectful tone throughout. Quietly, cerebrally, it packs a punch.
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Now running through November 19

TIME ALONE at L.A.T.C.

 (Photo by David Morrison)

(Photo by David Morrison)

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

FIXED – Echo Theater Company at Atwater Village Theatre

Photo by Darrett Sanders

Photo by Darrett Sanders

Deborah Klugman – Capital & Main

Ball culture — the subject of the 1991 documentary Paris Is Burning and the backdrop for Filipino-American playwright Boni B. Alvarez’s new play, Fixed — developed out of Harlem in the 1960s.
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Now running through October 22

RUNAWAY HOME at the Fountain Theatre

 (Photo by Ed Krieger)

(Photo by Ed Krieger)

Margaret Gray – LA Times

Jeremy J. Kamps’ play “Runaway Home,” now premiering at the Fountain Theatre, is set in New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward three years after Hurricane Katrina. The waters may have long receded, but the residents still wander like ghosts through the wreckage of their lives.
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Neal Weaver  – Stage Raw

Two years after Hurricane Katrina, playwright Jeremy J. Kamps went to New Orleans as a volunteer, “gutting and mucking” waterlogged, mold-ridden and decaying houses. He was able to observe firsthand the endless problems that plagued local residents in their efforts to rebuild and restore their destroyed communities: government assistance that came too late or not at all, displaced people unable to find lost friends and relatives, racism, red-tape and sometimes deliberate obstruction.

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Deborah Klugman – Capital & Main

Directed by Shirley Jo Finney, Jeremy J. Camps ‘ Runaway Home takes place in New Orleans in 2008 and revolves around a troubled 14-year-old runaway learning to survive on her own after a physical altercation with her mother prompts her to leave home.

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Now running through November 5

 

 

 

AMERICAN HOME at Fremont Center Theatre

Photo by Melissa Blue

Photo by Melissa Blue

Deborah Klugman – Capital & Main

The 2007-08 financial crisis and the collapse of the housing bubble created lots of heartache for lots of people. Playwright Stephanie Alison Walker was among the one in 54 homeowners nationwide to receive a foreclosure notice in 2008. The experience prompted her to write American Home….

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Now running through September 24

WELCOME TO YOUR ALTERNATIVE REALITY – Open Fist Theatre Company at Atwater Village Theatre

Photo by Darrett Sanders

Photo by Darrett Sanders

Deborah Klugman – Capital & Main

Writer/directors Catherine Butterfield and Ron West have titled this collection of comedy sketches, presented by the Open Fist Theatre Company, Welcome to Your Alternative Reality — an apt reference to what millions of Americans experience each day as they digest news of our mangled government construct and its inept and puerile president. Read more…

Now running through August 12

THE SWEETHEART DEAL at the Los Angeles Theatre Center

Grettel Cortes Photography

Grettel Cortes Photography

Deborah Klugman – Capital & Main

Written and directed by Diane Rodriguez, The Sweetheart Deal is an amiable blend of political agitprop and audience-pleasing melodrama that unfolds against the backdrop of the struggle to empower the United Farm Workers union. Read more…

Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze

In 1970, when Americans had causes to fight for, we literally took a stand, physically joining forces, moving into action for what we believed in. We didn’t merely tweet. Read more…

 

Now running through June 4

THE ORIGINALIST at the Pasadena Playhouse

orig 1

(Photo by Jim Cox Photography)

Deborah Klugman – Capital & Main

In John Strand’s play, The Originalist, the late Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia (Edward Gero) is presented as a lovable curmudgeon — rather like the tough, gruff but charismatic professor you might have had back in your university days. To appreciate the character, and the play, you need to be willing to suspend your knowledge of the sum damage of Scalia’s opinions on civil rights and the democratic process...Read more…

Frances Baum Nicholson – The Daily Breeze

In the opening moments of John Strand’s “The Originalist,” the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is addressing a large group at The Federalist Society. For those who care to look, this is an elegant shorthand about his background. (If you need to know more, check out Jeffrey Toobin’s article, which discusses that organization’s agenda and its foundational drive to train and raise up originalist conservative judges, in The New Yorker on April 17.)

Margaret Gray – LA Times

In John Strand’s snappy, timely, contrived drama “The Originalist,” now at the Pasadena Playhouse, it’s 2012, and a liberal law-school graduate named Cat has applied for a clerkship with conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Read more…

Now running through May 7

HARLEQUINO: ON TO FREEDOM at the Actors’ Gang

Photo by Ashley Randall

Photo by Ashley Randall

Deborah Klugman – Capital & Main

Writer/director Tim Robbins’ Harlequino: On to Freedom at the Actors’ Gang is a messy, boisterous show that runs nearly two and a half hours before the message it wants to deliver about personal freedom and self-determination comes through simply and clearly. Along the way, however, it features first-class talent, colorful spectacle and enough historical detail about commedia dell’ arte to keep audiences entertained and involved. Read more…

Now running through May 6

BARS AND MEASURES at The Theatre@Boston Court

bm1

Photo by Ed Krieger

Deborah Klugman – Capital & Main

Bars and Measures, Idris Goodwin’s moving drama, directed with a sure hand by Weyni Mengesha, can be appreciated on several levels. To begin with, it’s a political work, a disturbing tale involving the questionable prosecution of an American Muslim for abetting a terrorist organization. Second, this is a story about family…. Read more…

Now running through October 23