KURT VONNEGUT’S SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE
Thursday, October 7th, 2010RECOMMENDED
“You’ll either love it, or push it back in the science-fiction corner,” opined the New York Times in its 1969 review of Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war sci-fi novel Slaughterhouse Five. The same can probably be said about its theatrical adaptation by Eric Simonson, now getting its first West Coast production fourteen years after its World Premiere at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Theatergoers unfamiliar with Vonnegut’s dense, epic tale, or those whose tastes run towards realistic, linear storytelling rather than the avant-garde or experimental may choose to pass on Action Theatre’s intimate staging, despite its generally fine acting and imaginative direction by Tiger Reel. On the other hand, Vonnegut fans will want to check out how adapter Simonson manages to compact Slaughterhouse Five down to an intermission-free ninety minutes of live theater.
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THE ELEPHANT MAN
Monday, October 4th, 2010
When most people hear the title The Elephant Man, they likely recall David Lynch’s 1980 film, which received 8 Academy Award nominations, including one for John Hurt’s unforgettable leading performance.
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THE GOAT OR, WHO IS SYLVIA?
Saturday, September 25th, 2010
If you are a theatergoer who likes to be intellectually challenged, loves nothing more than laughing out loud unless it’s witnessing absolutely brilliant acting, doesn’t get his or her knickers in a twist by subject matter some would deem inappropriate for the dinner table—and if you know nothing at all about the plot twists in Edward Albee’s The Goat Or, Who Is Sylvia?, then read no further. Simply head on over to the Chance Theater for a production so all-around splendid that it will knock your goat’s wool socks off.
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DEAR HARVEY
Thursday, September 23rd, 2010
Before Sean Penn’s Academy Award-winning performance as Harvey Milk, it’s a fair guess that not too many people under the age of forty had ever heard of the first openly gay man elected to a major public office in the U.S. Dustin Lance Black’s movie changed all that, and now, Dear Harvey, a powerful dramatization of Milk’s words and those of the people who knew and worked with him, arrives at West Hollywood’s Lee Strasberg Theatre as a companion piece to the film, and one well worth seeing.
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THE WEB
Friday, September 17th, 2010
While surfing the Internet, Chris Quiñones makes a shocking discovery—someone with the very same name as his, a Chris Quiñones who graduated with very same high school class, has the same date, place, and even hospital of birth, the same Columbian father and Jewish mother… The very same Chris Quiñones, yet subtly different in small details like the fact that for one Chris a particular time of import is a.m. but for the other p.m. Chris stays online all night searching, until finally the trail left by Chris II ends about a year ago, in Djibouti, after which his doppelganger has seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth.
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RUINED
Thursday, September 16th, 2010
Playwright Lynn Nottage puts a human face on the ongoing Civil War in the Democratic Republic of Congo in her Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Ruined, now in its West Coast Premiere engagement at the Geffen Playhouse.
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MYSTERIOUS SKIN
Wednesday, September 15th, 2010
Mysterious Skin, Scott Heim’s powerful 1995 novel about two teenagers with a shared secret almost too horrendous to talk about, is the kind of book that would seem unadaptable to screen or stage, if only for its scenes of child sexual abuse. Still, miracle of miracles, Mysterious Skin The Movie and Mysterious Skin The Play did end up written, produced, and presented to audience bravos, the former by film maker Gregg Araki and the latter by playwright Prince Gomolvilas. It’s Gomolvilas’ ingenious stage adaptation that now gets an absolutely stunning Los Angeles Premiere at Little Tokyo’s East West Players in a production easily the Asian-American theater’s finest non-musical since Durango, three years ago.
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TITUS REDUX
Sunday, August 29th, 2010
John Farmanesh-Bocca’s Titus Redux is William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus like you’ve never seen it before. Yes, there’s still rape, mutilation, and two boys cooked in a pie, and much of Shakespeare’s original dialog remains intact. Still, from the moment Tamora responds to Titus’s “I give him you, the noblest that survives, the eldest son of this distressed queen,” with a very contemporary “Fuck you! You stubborn pigheaded asshole,” you know you’re in for something different.
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