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2016 Reviews
FEATURED REVIEWS
Disgraced | Mark Taper Forum
June 2016 – A powerful Pulitzer Prize-winner is both exceptional drama and insight into the roots and ramifications of one of the most mystifying and polarizing issues in the world today. • FULL REVIEW
Bull | Rogue Machine Theatre
June 2016 – Mike Bartlett's surrealist nightmare comedy makes its West Coast premiere as part of the 2016 Hollywood Fringe Festival. • FULL REVIEW
Romeo and Juliet | A Noise Within
February 2016 – Damaso Rodriguez and A Noise Within have given Shakespeare's love story muscle and maturity to open 2016 with institutional assurance. • FULL REVIEW
Barcelona | Geffen Playhouse
February 2016 – Bess Wohl's seemingly straightforward play has plenty of laughter and wisdom within it. In its West Coast premiere, director Trip Cullman creates a carefully delineated, highly enjoyable staging with a performance likely to be this site's 2016 favorite. FULL REVIEW
Sex with Strangers | Geffen Playhouse
February 2016 – Laura Eason’s play, in a well-realized staging by Kimberly Senior, begins with all the hallmarks of the classic pulp thriller: a beautiful woman alone in a large house when car headlights suddenly sweep the frozen panes followed by the crunch of approaching footsteps and a forceful knocking on the door. But this is a whodunit more concerned with authorship in an era of Internet anonymity and new questions about partner profiles. • FULL REVIEW
Cloud 9 | Antaeus Theatre Company
March 2016 – The sun, it was said, never set on the British Empire during the 19th and early 20th Centuries, but Caryl Churchill set her 1979 comedy to show how a misguided, patriarchal mindset would lead to the Empire's unraveling while maintaining social repression for another 80 years back in England. • FULL REVIEW
Women Laughing Alone with Salad | Kirk Douglas Theatre
March 2016 – Sheila Callaghan gives the play a flywheel heart that sparks numerous inter-related issues: The brighter ones land; the purely playful are just for show. The main target here is the pervasive power of image-based marketing. • FULL REVIEW
THEATER ARTICLES
Bettering the Bard
May 2, 2018 • Amy Freed has thrown herself into an update of William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew by inserting a wiley female contemporary of the playwright into his Prologue, and then steering the debate into more acceptable contemporary currents for modern audiences. • READ
'Rock' and the Hard Place
April 18, 2018 • Playwright Lauren Yee first heard Dengue Fever, a contemporary band whose music is based in the Cambodian rock of the early 1970s, seven or eight years ago. It sparked a desire to tell the story of what happened to that country's original rock scene. In March 2018, the world premiere of Cambodian Rock Band, her new play with music, saw her vision land amid standing ovations. • READ
A Bountiful Trip to 'Orange'
March 1, 2017 • After South Coast Repertory's Literary Manager Kimberly Coburn gave the playwright a personal tour of Orange County, Aditi Brennan Kapil doubted it would be a locale in the script she had just been commissioned to write. No problem, write whatever you want. The result, a play called Orange and "one of the most personal plays I have ever written." • READ
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