ALL MY SONS
Saturday, August 21st, 2010
Arthur Miller’s All My Sons is my very favorite 20th Century play, one I have now had the good fortune of seeing staged a half-dozen times. Debuting on Broadway less than two years after World War II ended with Japan’s surrender, Miller’s examination of personal responsibility in time of war remains every bit as powerful—and relevant— today, sixty-three years after its New York premiere.
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FREE MAN OF COLOR
Saturday, August 14th, 2010
“Thirty-four years before the end of slavery, I stood before my graduating class and wondered about my soul.”
The speaker is John Newton Templeton, a young ex-slave and the first man of color to attend Ohio University—over three decades before the Emancipation Proclamation.
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PARASITE DRAG
Friday, August 13th, 2010
The storm clouds on the Central Illinois horizon pale beside the shadows of abuse, adultery, addiction, illness, incest, and suicide in Parasite Drag, Mark Roberts’ slice of Midwest life now getting its Southern California Premiere at the Elephant Theatre Company. Electrically directed by David Fofi in association with Don Foster and powerfully performed by a quartet of topnotch actors, Parasite Drag mixes dramatic confrontations with biting dollops of humor to gripping effect.
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TOPDOG/UNDERDOG
Friday, August 6th, 2010NOT RECOMMENDED
Ben Brantley, the chief drama critic of the New York Times (i.e. the most important theater reviewer in the United States) called Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog “as exciting as any new play from a young American since Tony Kushner’s Angels In America.” It was nominated for a Best Play Tony Award and won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. I found it one of the two longest evenings I’ve spent in a theater in the past year.
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THE GOOD BOOK OF PEDANTRY AND WONDER
Sunday, August 1st, 2010
In 1879, British lexicographer James Murray was hired by Oxford University Press to edit a new dictionary of the English language, a task expected to take about ten years and result in a 7,000-page tome. Holed up in a corrugated-iron garden shed on the grounds of Mill Hill School, Murray began the monumental undertaking with the help of a small team of assistants. Neither the linguist nor the dons of Oxford could have imagined that it would take until 1928 for the dictionary to be completed (nearly a decade after Murray’s death) and that the final product would end up a twelve-volume tome instead of the initially planned four volumes.
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OPUS
Thursday, July 8th, 2010
Tales of rock bands’ acrimonious breakups are the stuff of legend—think Smashing Pumpkins, The Doors, Talking Heads, Pink Floyd, and of course The Beatles. Michael Hollinger’s Opus, now in its Los Angeles premiere at the Fountain Theatre, makes it clear that the world of classical music is no less volatile—and perhaps even more so.
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KING LEAR
Sunday, June 27th, 2010
When L.A.’s Classical Theatre Ensemble sets out to do its very first fully staged production of a William Shakespeare play, the result truly merits event status, especially when it is the Antaeus Company staging King Lear with not one His Majesty but two royal monarchs—Dakin Matthews and Harry Groener—and two entirely different casts to support them.
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ELEVATOR
Sunday, June 20th, 2010
Take a bunch of strangers and trap them in an enclosed space for a significant enough length of time and it’s a sure bet they’ll come out changed by the experience—if plays and movies are to be believed. Take the jurors in Twelve Angry Men, Tom Hanks and assorted others in You’ve Got Mail, or the high school kids in The Breakfast Club. Eleven jurors changed their verdict, Tom decided to leave Parker Posey for Meg Ryan, and the Princess, Jock, Brain, Criminal, and Basket Case all revealed themselves to be night-and-day different from our first impression of them and bonded in the process. Such is the stuff of stage and screen fiction.
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Since 2007, Steven Stanley's StageSceneLA.com has spotlighted the best in Southern California theater via reviews, interviews, and its annual StageSceneLA Scenies.
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