DUSK RINGS A BELL
Friday, October 14th, 2011
Playwright Stephen Belber starts off his latest with a classic romantic setup—then throws the audience an unexpectedly serious curve—in Dusk Rings A Bell, his not quite perfect but nonetheless highly affecting two-hander, now playing at Hollywood’s Blank Theatre in an exquisitely acted and directed West Coast Premiere.
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THE DINOSAUR WITHIN
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011
An aging, wheelchair-bound 1960s movie goddess longs for a return to past glories. Her greatest fan, a young Australian aborigine hoping to break into the movie biz in Hollywood, still mourns the death of his two older brothers to suicide. A newspaper reporter remains incapable of recovering from the disappearance of his ten-year-old son years before.
The lives of these three disparate characters intersect in both “The Dreamtime” and “The Dream Factory” in John Walch’s powerful, engrossing, deeply moving The Dinosaur Within, now getting its most major production to date at Pasadena’s Theatre @ Boston Court under the inspired direction of Michael Michetti.
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THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS
Sunday, October 9th, 2011
Stephen Metcalfe’s gripping new drama The Tragedy Of The Commons takes as its title a term coined in the early 1960s by sociobiologist Garrett Hardin, though it’s not until late in the play that its protagonist explains Hardin’s concept: (read more)
HOW THE WORLD BEGAN
Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
Ask a big city Blue State high school science teacher and a rural Bible Belt high school student how the world began and you’ll probably get two quite different answers. Put this teacher and this student in the same classroom in small town Kansas and sparks are likely to fly.
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THE WAR CYCLE: GOSPEL ACCORDING TO FIRST SQUAD
Friday, September 9th, 2011
Let’s say you want to tell a gripping, “ripped from today’s headlines” war story—and you’re operating on a tight budget. You can spend $11,000,000 as Kathryn Bigelow did for The Hurt Locker (and that’s cheap for a Hollywood flick). Or how about this for a suggestion? For maybe one-tenth of one percent of that budget, you can produce The War Cycle: Gospel According to First Squad, currently generating equivalent sparks at The Powerhouse Theatre. Talk about a no-brainer!
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RABBIT HOLE
Tuesday, August 30th, 2011RECOMMENDED
For a play that won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole has had surprisingly few local productions in the ensuing years, perhaps a result of its seemingly grim subject matter. For that reason alone, the play’s arrival at Theatre Palisades is good news for L.A. theatergoers. Though this high-end community theater production doesn’t reach the heights of the Chance Theater’s award-winning 2008 production, it is one worth checking out, whether you’ve seen last year’s Oscar-nominated film adaptation, a previous live staging, or this is your first exposure to Rabbit Hole.
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TRYST
Friday, August 12th, 2011
George Love has never met a woman he couldn’t seduce, wed, fleece, and abandon (all in short order), and he has never met a woman more ripe for seduction than Adelaide Pinchin. It’s no wonder, therefore, that this master of the romantic con makes the plump, plain, downright pathetic London seamstress his latest target in Karoline Leach’s Edwardian thriller Tryst, now making a welcome return to L.A. area stages at San Pedro’s Little Fish Theatre.
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PASSING PROPER/PASSION AND PRECISION
Sunday, August 7th, 2011
A would-be screenwriter attempts to navigate the shark-ridden Hollywood waters in Passion And Precision, the second of a matched set of one-acts by Joe Davis Massingill. That the first of the two, Passing Proper, just happens to be a staged version of the very screenplay the writer is hoping to sell is just one of several reasons to check out the two plays running on a single bill at Theatre 68.
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