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 Joel Elkins~
Oswald, now making its West Coast premiere at the Write Act Repertory Theater, dramatizes the interrogation of Lee Harvey Oswald by Dallas Police Captain William Fritz during the chaotic 48 hours following the assassination of President Kennedy. LA playwright Dennis Richard has used publicly recorded statements (such as Oswald’s meeting with reporters) [...]
by Joel Elkins~
“Fasten your seatbelts—it’s gonna be a bumpy night!” Bette Davis’s classic line from All About Eve applies equally to – and provides the title of – Seatbelts Required, a new play by Kimberly Demmary, now playing at The Actors Workout Studio.
Seatbelts has three half-sisters gathering at their mother’s house (depicted in classical [...]
by Joel Elkins~
Baby Doll, now playing at the Lillian Theatre, is a play based on a movie based on a play. Tennessee Williams adapted his one-act 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (with the help of Elia Kazan) for the 1956 movie Baby Doll, directed by Kazan and starring Karl Malden, Caroll Baker and Eli Wallach.
The [...]
by Joel Elkins~
The Elephant Theatre has “re-opened” its production of Love Sick, a brand new play by first-time playwright Kristina Poe, following a successful first run. Don’t get fooled by its teen-flick title. It is not a romantic comedy. It’s a dark, surreal treatment of real issues suffused with bits of humor, [...]
by Joel Elkins~
The Leopard, a one-man play now playing at the Working Stage Theater, presents a compelling fictionalized picture of Ernest Hemingway’s final day.
Playwright Yabo Yablonsky presents a Hemingway not usually seen. Missing is the bravado and pompousness often associated with the man popularly known as “Papa.” During his last day filled with [...]
by Joel Elkins~
One of the problems with being a classical theater company is that eventually, inevitably you may have to put on a performance of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, arguably the most racist piece of literature still being performed in civilized society today.
While one could hardly imagine a contemporary restaging of “Song of the South,” [...]
by Joel Elkins~
Could you write a play if someone held a gun to your head? When someone did this to Doug Haverty, the unfortunate result was Next Window, Please, now making its theatrical debut at the Lonny Chapman Theatre.
While working as the manager at a Crocker Bank in Hollywood, Haverty was robbed at gunpoint. As [...]
by Joel Elkins~
Watson, now playing at the Sacred Fools Theater, tells the tale of the last adventure of Sherlock Holmes and his famous sidekick. Written and directed by Jaime Robledo, it is an homage to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s timeless stories of London’s greatest detective.
In Robledo’s version, however, Holmes is more of a comic figure, [...]
by Joel Eklins~
Someday, when you really think you’ve got it hard, imagine being a closeted lesbian South American Muslim living in New York following 9/11. Such is the lot of Hanna Jokhoe, the main character in Wendy Graf’s one-act one-woman show No Word in Guyanese for Me, now making its world premiere [...]
by Joel Elkins~
The Pico Playhouse, once the location of the long-running show Bleacher Bums, now presents a different collection of passionate and frustrated people united for a single purpose in Twelve Angry (Men), a slight reworking of Reginald Rose’s classic stage and screen play. The “Men” is in parentheses because the production makes [...]
