Bob Verini – ArtsInLA If there’s a more sheerly interesting playwright in the United States these days than Bruce Norris, I don’t know who it is. In a continuing series of audacious, ambitious comedies, he has remained resolutely non-P.C. in questioning some of our culture’s most cherished assumptions on race (his Pulitzer winner Clybourne Park), … Read more
JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE by August Wilson. Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly For this critic August Wilson has always been eloquent on the page, a bit wordy on the stage. This second in his 10-play chronicle of the African-American experience takes place in 1911, a bare 46 years after the Civil War ended. Wilson’s vibrant characters … Read more
Tribes by Nina Raine. Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA Intense and heartbreaking, Nina Raine’s drama Tribes is about a turbulent family and the one member who feels left out. A Bohemian British family consisting of a loud, domineering and profane writer father, a hippy mother, and three grown children — two sons and a daughter, who have all moved home — all … Read more
Red by John Logan. Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA It’s refreshing to experience a play about ideas, and not simply character or story. John Logan’s incendiary play Red is a two-character bio-drama about abstract expressionist fine artist Mark Rothko in conversation with his young assistant. Read more… Dany Margolies – ArtsinLA No question, Alfred Molina is otherworldly brilliant here, playing mid-century American painter Mark Rothko … Read more