Opening the Curtain

Today we start with a quick refresher on obscure classical Greek theater...the Satyr Play. Now, Satyrs are the those bawdy half man/half beast follower's of Dionysus -- god of wine and all things good -- like theater...

Sometimes the best theater happens outside the theater. Like in the line at the grocery store. That little snippet of a conversation that you overhear during checkout. Or maybe in your yoga class:  that budding romance between the two over in the corner.  It's those moments where you suddenly get a peak into a stranger's life, where a little detail reveals an entire world...

So you get the email. You know, that email. Maybe it's from someone in Nigeria with a pile of money or maybe you've won the Irish Sweepstakes. You go to hit delete but then . . . hey, what if it's true? Who couldn't use a pile of free money? That's the setup for Karl Gadjusek's dark-comedy, Greedy...

With the holidays and the year end upon us, it's that time again when we look back out our lives and creative some kind narrative; was it a good year? A bad year? A year of "personal growth?" For monologist Spalding Gray, this personal storytelling wasn't a once a year thing; he made a career out of it...

They say that at the end of Shakespeare's plays, everyone's either dead or married. Much Ado about Nothing falls into the wedding category. And you can experience all the nuptial bliss at the Kirk Douglas Theater in Culver City in a new production by the Los Angeles Shakespeare Center...

In 1977, after a decade of drowning his demons, Tennessee Williams finished an autobiographical play he'd started 40 years before. On the page, the play reads a bit like a "Portrait of the Artist as a young-recently-closeted-gay-man.‘  At its center is a young 'writer' living in a New Orleans' boarding house trying to find his voice. Panned as the mutterings of a genius past his prime, Vieux Carré closed after only six performances on Broadway. This is not Williams at his best, and, yet, in the hands of Elizabeth LeCompte and the Wooster Group it becomes a window into the writer's tortured soul and a piece of theater not to be missed...

The holidays are upon us. There's no escaping it. From the incessant carols at Rite-Aid and the ringing of the Salvation Army bells outside to the crystal clear brisk blue skies above, it's that time of year. And what better way to get in the seasonal spirit than with a little holiday theater?

Here’s the Cliff Notes of a new work now at RedCat. A woman gives the audience a slideshow tour of her beloved Rotterdam...There’s a statue there there she hates... She’s joined by three actors also from Rotterdam... They begin reading emails while sitting in white lawn chairs... Their emails are about the statue, arts funding, and revenge...

The new show Hyperbole: origins begins with a quick history of LA from the Indians all the way through Sig alerts, all captured with little more than a hunk of styrofoam and some dolls on toothpicks. While not necessarily historically accurate, or politically correct, the saga brilliantly captures the stereotypes of LA LA land...

Playwright John Steppling's characters are not the kind of people you'd like to meet in a dark alley.  They are desperate men.  They're men living on the fringes, outside the normal bounds of society.  It's not that they are without honor, quite the contrary, but it's an honor and a code of an extraordinary world, often a lost world...