Ed Rampell – Hollywood Progressive
In the last couple of years there has been a trend of L.A.’s live stages reviving classics of the Theater of the Absurd: The Geffen Playhouse presented Beckett’s (that valiant veteran of the French anti-Nazi Resistance!) Waiting for Godot; A Noise Within Ionesco’s Exit the King; and The Actors’ Gang Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists. (The anarchic Gang also staged Elmer Rice’s Expressionist classic The Adding Machine.) And now we have The Arsonists. It seems that some of L.A.’s socially aware theaters are trying to make sense of the everyday absurdity and buffoonery of the Trump regime through the probing lens of the Theater of the Absurd’s exemplars. Read more…
Travis Michael Holder – TicketHoldersLA
This staging of Max Frisch’s mid-century classic holds up an unvarnished mirror on our own tenuous national nightmare, offering a timely, hilarious, and deeply unsettling wake-up call about what happens when people choose to hand over the matches. Read more…