EDWARD II
Friday, May 14th, 2010
Who would have thought that a play written well over four hundred years ago by a contemporary of William Shakespeare would be in-your-face gay enough to make it an appropriate choice for an LGBT theater season?
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THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WAY
Sunday, May 9th, 2010
Here’s a question for all you history buffs out there. What two 20th Century inventions revolutionized gay men’s search for quick, anonymous sex with other men?
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COPENHAGEN
Friday, May 7th, 2010
There’s a moment early on in Michael Frayn’s Tony Award-winning Copenhagen when Margrethe Bohr says reassuringly to her physicist husband Niels, “I don’t think anyone has yet discovered a way you can use theoretical physics to kill people.” Ironic words indeed when spoken to one of the theoretical physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project developing the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, weapons which led to the immediate or eventual deaths of 200,000 human beings.
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THE GIFT HORSE
Monday, May 3rd, 2010
Lydia R. Diamond’s Stick Fly was one of the biggest critical successes of last year’s theater season, scoring nominations and/or wins at L.A.’s Big Three award ceremonies—the Ovations, the LADCCs, and the LA Weeklys.
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WELCOME HOME JENNY SUTTER
Sunday, April 25th, 2010
Jenny Sutter is the newest kind of wounded war vet—a female United States Marine who, just like her male counterparts did four decades ago upon returning home from an unpopular war in Southeast Asia, has no idea how she can possibly fit back into a “normal” life after the hell she experienced in Iraq.
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BENT
Sunday, April 18th, 2010RECOMMENDED
Recent years have seen great strides for the LGBT movement in the United States and even more so in certain other parts of the world. At the same time, as a visit to Towleroad.com will attest, anti-gay violence occurs on a daily basis, and in countries like Uganda, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, the mere fact of being gay can mean death, and not merely by your garden variety basher but by the government itself. Thus, Theatre Out’s production of Martin Sherman’s Bent comes at a propitious time indeed, and though a key directorial decision dilutes its power, a committed cast and one performance in particular make this an important piece of theater for LGBT playgoers and general audiences as well.
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THE BLUE ROOM
Sunday, April 11th, 2010RECOMMENDED
Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler’s 1900 play La Ronde so shocked the early 20th Century European theatrical world that it didn’t get its first public performance until 1920, and even then the play (and Schnitzler) were roundly attacked by critics and theatergoers alike. Hardly surprising, considering its plot—a sequence of not two or three, but ten sexual encounters. No matter that the most the play showed was a bit of foreplay, the actual sex taking place entirely in the audience’s imagination during brief blackouts. It was too much for Europe, let alone America, to take.
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LASCIVIOUS SOMETHING
Thursday, April 8th, 2010
Liza is August’s Lascivious Something in Sheila Callaghan’s provocative, adventurous, stimulating, surprising new play of the same name. Better put, she was his lascivious something back in the 1960s when the two were fighting the good fight against the Vietnam War and all things rigid, boring, and traditional.
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