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~
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 Marcus Kaye~
Procreation takes a long, hard look at a dysfunctional family and the issues with, you guessed it, procreation. Directed by David Schweizer and written by Justin Tanner, Procreation is a troubled, crowded piece of theater.
The production was troubled from the get go. Originally set to open in New York City (where producers Linda [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
Alistair Beaton’s 2007 translation of Max Frisch’s The Arsonists (which was first translated into English as The Firebugs), now playing in its American premier at the Odyssey Theatre, is an allegorical and absurdist black comedy which examines middle class complacency in the face of great evil. Originally directed pointedly at the German people [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
Duel Citizens is actually two distinct plays with little in common besides that in each, all the characters are played by one person.
In Look, What I don’t Understand, a young family man from communist Bulgaria tries, with his family, to enter the United States as a political refugee in 1969. Through flashbacks we [...]
by D. Jette~
British actor and playwright Tim Crouch has received international acclaim for his stage work for good reason: not only is he a captivating and compassionate performer, as a playwright he has demonstrated a fundamental understanding of what makes theatre different from all other narrative arts, an understanding that he puts to work in [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
Fate is the notion that there is a power quite outside ourselves that controls the interactions and odd happenings of our lives, that there are outcomes and circumstance we experience that are pre-determined for us. The idea is that, when something unexpectedly wonderful or tragic happens, it was fated to happen. Fate can [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
~Mercy Warren and Abigail Adams~
Few Americans know anything more about Benedict Arnold than his name, which has become synonymous with the word “Traitor”. Fewer still know anything at all about the women of the American revolution besides, possibly, Betsy Ross, who had something to do with a flag.
Mercy Warren was a playwright, [...]
by Geoff Hoff
Pinter is difficult. The best Pinter is the most difficult. I did not know No Man’s Land before I saw it tonight at the Odyssey Theatre. I still don’t know it. I don’t think knowing it is possible. Experiencing it, however, was wonderful. It is, like much [...]
by Geoff Hoff
I’m going to go about this review a bit backwards, talk about the actors, then about the play. One of the big draws, after all, is Megan Mullally. Megan Mullally is a hoot. She was a hoot as Karen on Will & Grace, she was a hoot in another small theatre [...]
by Geoff Hoff
I have been a fan of Culture Clash since I first encountered them at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in their production of The Mission some time in the eighties. I have admired every show of theirs that I’ve seen since. It was, then, in great anticipation when I saw on [...]
