Theatre Articles

Just to get it out of the way, I’m not going to compare the Center Theatre Group’s production of Frost/Nixon to the film directed by Ron Howard. Mostly, it’s because I haven’t seen the film. And I haven’t seen the film mostly because there’s more art out there than this art critic has time for, and trailers featuring Frank Langella portraying Nixon with a bag of marbles in his mouth don’t quite offer much of an incentive. With that in mind, I’m pleased to say that irrespective of the movie, Frost/Nixon, the stage production, is outstanding.

It may not have much by way of character psychology, and Mack the Knife’s troubles with women and rivals among Victorian society’s downtrodden offers only a thin thread of plot, but the satirical, borderline-polemic window into the brutish lives of the poor certainly draws blood.

On May 17, 1968, during the latter half of the Vietnam War, nine Catholic anti-war activists broke into the offices of the Selective Service in Catonsville, MD, removed hundreds of draft files, and took them to the street where they poured homemade napalm and set the whole lot on fire. They were subsequently arrested, tried, and convicted of destroying U.S. property and interfering with the Selective Service Act of 1967. One of the nine, Father Daniel Berrigan, dramatized the trial as The Trial of the Catonsville Nine.

Theatre-goers who went to West Los Angeles College a weekend ago to see the two-act play “A Sunday Kind of Gal,” written and directed by Christina Cottles, at the Fine Arts Theatre were treated to performances both remarkable and relevant.

Ah, yes. The holidays. Christmas carols over the speakers of stuff-selling stores. Tinsel for the trees. Snow on Disney’s Main Street. The Ivy and the Holly. Ho, ho, ho, and glowing red noses – a certain reindeer’s luminous proboscis and too much rum in the egg nog. Colourful wrapping paper, ribbons and gift cards. Chocolate peppermint bark. Family visits. And maybe, just maybe a dash of that old bah, humbug? In the stress of the holidays, the relentless drive to play a part in unbridled consumerism, the forced smiles and strained good cheers – surely it’s not uncommon to feel a bit like a pre-phantasmic Scrooge amidst the onslaught.

An alleged Elizabethan-era association of free-thinkers devoted to science, philosophy, poetry, politics and the repudiation of religion, is an inspired topic for a play – especially when this association encompasses the likes of Sir Walter Raleigh and Christopher Marlowe. The School of Night’s history is so murky – even the name is, apparently, a retroactive indulgence by modern writers taken from a line in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour Lost – that it lends itself to intriguing historical speculation. Toss in a turbulent political climate under Queen Elizabeth I and we have a fertile setting for a provocative drama involving freedom of religion and thought and the birth pangs of science.

…I lumped faith and ignorance together. Without all the necessary philosophical and theological qualifications that would normally accompany that kind of statement, this particular lumping could come across as insulting. That’s how atheists feel when people like Danny Bental presumes to tell them they can’t really find meaning in their lives without God, beauty, or anything worthwhile…
…The disconnect I illustrated above arises from a simple letter to the editor, yet it hints at a greater disconnect like the one that exists between Evangelical Christianity and not only atheism, but other religions as well. This Beautiful City, based on actual interviews conducted by theatrical production group The Civilians, looks at the Evangelical movement through an exploration of Colorado Springs prior to the 2006 mid-term elections…It is arguably the best production put on by the Kirk Douglas in recent memory.

How swanky is the rejuvenated Mark Taper Forum? Let’s put it this way: The urinals in the men’s toilet (of all things) aren’t stainless steel or the usual boring white ceramic, but black. That’s right, black. In a lithe and sexy designer environment – think retro sci-fi lounge chic with a touch of glam – it’s the kind of small touch that acts like sequins on a little black dress. But the curious side-effect of the Forum’s year-long remodeling effort is as much a highlight of the (original) Forum’s architectural shortcomings as a glossing over. While the iconic exterior, with its defining circularity and cement mural by Jacques Overhoff, has been preserved, the interior suffers from flow control issues stemming from the crowding of circulation spaces on the edge of the Forum by the central theatre space.

In the ultimate act of civil disobedience, six dead soldiers refuse to be buried, defying both their generals’ orders and the heartbroken entreaties of their wives, girlfriends, and mothers. A first reading of Bury the Dead would see this disturbance of the natural order as an anti-war screed, which on one level it is.

The program describes KLÜB as an existential comedy in which actors trapped in a play must audition to get out. To some extent, this is an accurate summary. Like a theatre of the absurd, KLÜB is a place outside the normal space/time continuum, a metaphorical stand-in for life and the acting profession, a continuation of Camus, Beckett and friends. A troupe of actors, harassed by the unseen, god-like voice of the Director, stages desperate performances in an effort to escape the paradox of an existence in which the only rule is that there are no rules.