Opening the Curtain

Okay, it's unavoidable. The holidays are upon us. Amidst the turkeys, black Fridays and Holiday parties, how about a little theater? Anthony Byrnes offers a quick list of the holiday spectacles on our stages.

10 Million is simultaneously a private story of a family torn apart and a political history about the very personal impacts of Cuba's revolution. The Cuban production is part of the Encuentro de las Américas theater festival, a celebration of Latin theater from the Americas.

At first it's just small details . . . There's something odd about Erin Courtney's play A Map of Virtue. 

At its simplest level, With Love and a Major Organ is about a girl who falls in love with a guy she only knows through their shared subway rides. She decides to confess her love onto those tapes and deliver them to him with her heart -- her actual beating heart.

Part of the magic of a great play is you get to experience a new world. For just a couple hours, you become a traveler with the actors into a playwright's thoughts, ideas, customs. Sometimes that journey is just across town, but if we're lucky we get to travel to another part of the world. For Guillermo Calderon's play Mateluna we travel to a politically fraught Chile.

What happens when the technological magic of a theater piece eclipses the theatrical magic?

All great plays tell a story . . . but not all stories make a play.

There's a great play in the aftermath of the tragedy that was Hurricane Katrina. Runaway Home isn’t it.

The ancient Greeks thought theater was a way to speak directly to the gods.  Tarrell Alvin McCraney and Phylicia Rashad do them one better by arguing with God.

Each fall the Getty opens its outdoor amphitheater in Malibu to a theater company to produce a classic Greek or Roman play for a modern audience. The gods are particularly demanding in Euripedes' final play, Iphigenia in Aulis, this year's offering, produced by Chicago's Court Theatre.