Playwright Dionna Michelle Daniel has crafted a unique piece of theatre with American Saga – Gunshot Medley: Part 1. In a scant seventy minutes, she lays bare the horrors of the Black experience of slavery, its subjugation, cruelty and violence, as well as the human joy of life itself, of love and children. Ms. Daniel puts … Continue reading “American Saga – Gunshot Medley: Part 1” at Rogue Machine
Upon entering the theatre for the Southern California premiere of John O’Keefe’s utterly unique play, All Night Long, the first thing an audience sees is the remarkable set designed (and built) by director Jan Munroe. It is a solid representation of an American living room and kitchen with stairs leading up to three close-set doors. … Continue reading “All Night Long” at Open Fist
In his one-man show BLACK!, British actor, playwright and storyteller Michael Washington Brown takes on the personae of four diverse black men. With a brief introduction, he marks out the territory, an exploration of how blackness is viewed both from within a culture and from without. His first character is a smooth talking American who … Continue reading “BLACK!” at Zephyr Theatre
That Jane Austen is ever popular is a given. Readers have loved her books for more than two hundred years and film and television adaptations abound. Her novels are, of course, written from the female point of view and deal with love and family relations that are often complex and represent individuals primarily of the … Continue reading “Sense and Sensibility” at South Coast Repertory
Back in 1991 or there about, I had the great honor and pleasure of meeting Ray Bradbury. Understand that Mr. Bradbury was one of the gods of my literary adolescence along with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. At the Western Stage in Salinas, we were mounting a staged reading of a musical version of Fahrenheit … Continue reading “Martians: An Evening With Ray Bradbury” at the Whitefire Theatre
Christopher Vened’s new play, Infidel, now playing at Whitefire Theatre, is set in the seething cauldron of the Middle East, in Iraq specifically, where an American scholar, John Norton (Ted Monte), an anthropologist researching the roots of written literature, is kidnapped from an antiquities museum by a band of masked Islamic terrorists and spirited off … Continue reading “Infidel” at Whitefire Theatre
As proven by the immortal playwrights—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Wilde, O’Neill, Miller, Williams and many more—great plays live on beyond their initial run to be experienced by audiences who, over the years, decades, and centuries, are moved to the tears and laughter exemplified by the iconic masks of tragedy and comedy. Tennessee Williams’ first successful play, … Continue reading “The Glass Menagerie” at International City Theatre
