Opening the Curtain

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins plays aren’t quite what they seem on the surface. Or maybe a better way to say that is - they are everything they seem to be ... and more. Take his play “Appropriate” or “Appropriate” that played at the Taper in 2015.(That was a couple years ago but stick with me - because he’s doing something very similar now).

It’s easy to see why Lynn Nottage’s play “Sweat” won a Pulitzer prize. “Sweat” chronicles what happens to a union factory town when the old way of doing things isn’t doing it anymore. It’s set mostly in a local dive bar. The kind of place you go after your shift to grab a beer. The kind of place you celebrate every birthday since - well, hell you can’t even remember it’s been so long.

The question of the classical soul is always looming in the air for the Getty Villa’s annual outdoor drama. Calling upon those classical Greek and Roman plays, one always wonders how academic, how true to form (and perhaps devoid of soul) will the work be? That question is particularly poignant when Anne Bogart and SITI Company are tackling the Greeks, as they are for the third time this year, with Euripides “Bacchae.”

It’s in roughly the third scene of Circle X’s world premiere of “Hole in the Sky” that the moon rises behind the actors. Not a prop moon or a piece of scenery - the actual moon…because we’re sitting on the edge of horse stable deep in the Valley - Lake View Terrace to be exact.

The tricky thing with a musical like “Cabaret” is that it’s so iconic.

Yes, this is a play about new mothers but because child-rearing is inextricably linked to privilege and class it becomes about much, much more than that. To say this is play that could only be written by a women is like saying only a woman can give birth - both overly simplistic and more complicated than we can fully grasp.

With most plays and playwrights, you track story, character, plot. There’s a sense that while the source of the drama may have been the playwrights mind that’s not the setting. That’s not how it works with a Murray Mednick play.

You know how you feel about brussels sprouts? You know you should probably eat them. “A Month in the Country,” the Turgenev classic, is basically the theatrical equivalent of brussels sprouts. Fortunately, the Patrick Marber adaptation of “Three Days in the Country,” - is like the chef that throws in a little bacon into the brussels sprouts and makes you reconsider the whole affair.

The story behind the play "Hostage" is incredible.