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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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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