Bakersfield Mist — where to begin with this exhilarating piece of theatre. The actors? The script? The production? “In the beginning was the word,” so let’s start with Stephen Sachs’ brilliant, erudite script. The two-character play puts diametrically opposite people in delicious conflict. Maude Gutman (the effervescent, surprisingly athletic Jenny O’Hara), a recently fired bartender … Continue reading “Bakersfield Mist” at The Fountain Theatre
Jaimi Paige Photo by Karianne Flaathen Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, bold and controversial when it premiered in 1890, retains its power in the Twenty-First Century. Australian playwright Andrew Upton blows the cobwebs off old translations and jumps the action from the 1890s into the early 1920s. While faithful to Ibsen’s text, the playwright underscores the … Continue reading “Hedda Gabler” — A Masterful Performance at Antaeus Theatre Company
Written in the early 1920s, Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape puts the chasm between unskilled, brute labor and the idle moneyed class front and center in the most passionate of ways. Yank (Hailé D’Alan in a dominating, physical performance) is the kingpin of a gang of stokers on a trans-Atlantic passenger liner. Toiling in the … Continue reading “The Hairy Ape” at Odyssey Theatre Ensemble
In 1970, Peter Brook and the Royal Shakespeare Company shook the dust off a perennial favorite and liberated Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, infusing it with a modernity that fit the times. It was heralded as the “Circus Midsummer,” a muscular version featuring actors on trapezes. It was a ground breaking, heralded production that toured … Continue reading “Tempest Redux” at Odyssey Theatre
The bed in Sheila Callaghan’s new play Bed, now in its premiere production at The Echo Theater Company, is huge, at least a California king, and dominates the playing space. The action there is vigorous sex spared from being pornographic by taking place beneath an appropriately large comforter. Bracketing the sex play in this ninety-minute … Continue reading “Bed” at The Echo Theater Company
The truly remarkable play, My Sister, currently in production at Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles, tells the tale of identical twins trying to make a go of it in Berlin as the National Socialists rose to power in the Germany of the 1930s. The sisters, Magda (Emily Hinkler) and Matilde (Elizabeth Hinkler) eke out a … Continue reading “My Sister” at Odyssey Theatre
The thing of it about short plays, plays of around ten minutes duration, is that they pack into those precious few moments a wealth of human drama with its sorrow and slapstick, grief and joy. If one loves a particular little playlet, it ends too quickly. If one doesn’t really care for it, well, it … Continue reading “Pick of the Vine” at Little Fish Theatre
It’s an audacious undertaking, this thorny jazz musical; a love story wrapped up in a conundrum. “Miravel, or The Promise of Alphonso Bloch” – written by Jake Broder, with music and lyrics by Jake Broder, starring Jake Broder and featuring the amazing Jake Broder at the piano – draws a cue from Rostand’s “Cyrano” and … Continue reading “Miravel, or The Promise of Alphonso Bloch” at Sacred Fools Theater Company
To call Rogue Artists Ensemble’s “Wood Boy Dog Fish” a bold, multimedia extravanganza is entirely appropriate. It is a mélange of disciplines both onstage and off. To tell the story of Carlo Collodi’s “The Adventures of Pinocchio” in a new, adult oriented way, the production deploys a squadron of actors, artists, designers and technicians to … Continue reading Rogue Artists Ensemble’s “Wood Boy Dog Fish” at Bootleg Theater
In The Fountain Theatre’s production of Athol Fugard’s “The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek,” a West Coast premiere, the time is 1981 and the setting is an arid hillside in Mpumalanga Province, Union of South Africa. An old man and a young boy enter onto a dry, dirt-filled stage where stones have been painted in … Continue reading “The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek” at The Fountain Theatre
Paul Myrvold's Theatre Notes 