CHERRY SMOKE
Wednesday, April 20th, 2011
The going-nowhere existences of a quartet of 20somethings living in an unemployment-plagued Donora, Pennsylvania are brought to painfully vivid life by playwright James McManus in his award-winning Cherry Smoke, now getting a first-rate West Coast Premiere by the brand new Lucky Mellon Collective, an exciting addition to the Los Angeles theater scene.
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THE ECCENTRICITIES OF A NIGHTINGALE
Sunday, April 17th, 2011
“The thing for you to give up is your affectations, your little put-on mannerisms that make you seem, well, slightly peculiar to people. You express yourself in fantastic high-flown phrases. Your hands fly about you like a pair of wild birds! You get out of breath, you stammer, you laugh hysterically and clutch at your throat.”
–Reverend Winemiller, The Eccentricities Of A Nightingale
It can’t have been easy for Tennessee Williams growing up gay in the South in the early 20th Century, and the above-quoted advice could easily have been given to him by a well-meaning father unaware of the hurt his words could inflict. In fact, words like these are probably still being heard, even in 2011, by gay youths whose outcast status leaves them very little faith that it will ever (in the words of a spate of recent YouTube videos) “get better.”
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THE TEMPERAMENTALS
Friday, April 15th, 2011
Wikipedia calls the 1969 Stonewall riots “the first instance in American history when people in the homosexual community fought back against a government-sponsored system that persecuted sexual minorities” and “the defining event that marked the start of the gay rights movement in the United States and around the world.”
Sorry Wikipedia, but you’ve got it wrong. The movement for gay rights actually began about two decades earlier right here in Los Angeles, the brainchild of a man named Harry Hay, and Jon Marans’ The Temperamentals sets the record straight (or gay, if you wish).
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RETURN FROM THE ASHES
Wednesday, April 13th, 2011RECOMMENDED
Fabienne Wolf has ”un petit problemme,” and she has come to her father Dr. Pierre Le Bigan for help. The beautiful young Frenchwoman believes the time has come for her missing-person mother Elizabeth Wolf Pilgrin, once Pierre’s lover, to be declared dead, and the only one with the legal authority to do so is Pierre. Naturally, the physician’s refusal to accede to his daughter’s request does not sit well with Fabienne, set to inherit a vast fortune upon her mother’s death, money she plans to share with her stepfather Stanislaus Pilgrin, her mother’s much younger husband and Fabienne’s current lover.
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THE SONNETEER
Monday, April 11th, 2011
Nick Salamone’s exquisite The Sonneteer has the look and feel of a theatrical classic, yet it is one that could only have been written by a contemporary playwright.
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SILENT SKY
Sunday, April 10th, 2011
When you think of pioneering names in the field of Astronomy, who pops into your head? Nicolaus Copernicus? Galileo Galilei? Tycho Brahe? Sir Isaac Newton? Johanes Kepler?
Notice anything these five men have in common?
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THE YOUNG MAN FROM ATLANTA
Friday, April 1st, 2011
The love that dare not speak its name remains conspicuously unspoken in Horton Foote’s 1995 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Young Man From Atlanta, at long last getting its splendid Los Angeles Premiere, directed by August Viverito for the multi-award winning The Production Company.
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GROUNDSWELL
Sunday, March 27th, 2011
The legacy of Apartheid lives on even today, two decades after the end of its ugly segregationist laws, in Groundswell, Ian Bruce’s ninety-minute psychological thriller now getting an absolutely swell Southern California production at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre.
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