Konstantine Stanislavski Love art in yourself and not yourself in art.
Harold Clurman The stage is life, music, beautiful girls, legs, breasts, not talk or intellectualism or dried-up academics.
by Geoff Hoff~
I realize that, over the few years I have been a theatre critic, I have become a bit jaded. I suspect it may be one of the inevitable consequences of the pursuit. I want every play I see to be brilliant, and enough aren’t that I no longer expect it, which is sad. [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
Alan Ayckbourn has written more plays than many of us have seen in our lives, some 74 full length ones at last count, not to mention a one-act, plays for children, screenplays, scripts for television and radio, sketches for reviews and at least one book. He loves playing with setting. In Norman [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
Wilfred Owen was a young soldier in World War One (the first war to end all wars), sent to the Craiglockhart War Hospital for the Mentally Disabled because he suffered from shell shock, which his commanding officer called “Cowardice”. There he met poet and decorated war hero Siegfried Sassoon who befriended him and [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
There are those who actually set out to offend their audience. I can certainly understand the impulse, and even possibly respect it as a way of getting a point across, but it isn’t my style. I never set out intentionally to offend. I will often even soften things, put them in the most [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
William Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream is, probably, his most produced work. There are many reasons for that; it is fairly simple, fairly magical and very funny. It is “safe” Shakespeare, for those who think they don’t or can’t understand or appreciate the plays. Besides, it’s always fun to see someone turned into a [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
(Full disclosure: David Jette, the writer of the play Leiris/Picasso, also writes for this publication. -ed)
An existential-door slamming farce. That’s what Wednesday Night at the House of Michel Leiris: A Reading of the Play “Desire Caught by the Tail” by the Painter Pablo Picasso (otherwise known as Leiris/Picasso) is. The well timed [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
Mabel Davies has a work-a-day husband who is distant and doesn’t like her son. Her “best friend” neighbor, Fran, is an alcoholic divorcee who, it seems, will sleep with anyone, including Mabel’s son, who is a neo-Nazi who really hates his father. And Mabel moves forward in life pretending all is well. She [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
What to do with our aging parents. It is a problem that many face, some more elegantly than others. It is especially troubling when one of your parents starts to do odd things. When you notice this, it is often to late to take matters into your own hands. However, when the parent [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
There’s no getting around it. I don’t like script for the play Jesse Boy, now playing at the Ruskin Group Theatre. However, I fear that explaining why I don’t won’t be easy without giving too much about the play away, and no matter how much I dislike something, I am loath [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
(Full Disclosure: One of the actors in The Actor’s Nightmare, Kat Primeau, is one of LA Theatre Review’s writers.)
The two one-act plays, usually produced in tandem, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You and The Actor’s Nightmare are both quite different from each other but both share being absurd black comedies, being [...]
