Jason Rohrer

PURE CONFIDENCE BY A NOSE Featuring a bright, pretty Tom Buderwitz set, Lower Depth Theatre Ensemble’s Pure Confidence is a chance to see something increasingly rare under Equity rules: a stageful of hot actors really close up, working hard and nailing it. From the front row (there are only three), William Salyers’ frightened eyes, Tamara…

PRINCE ON FIRE Chronicling the lurid and lamentable swashbuckles of a permanent ingenue, Pericles is a Book of Job for the Age of Reason. If the play were self-aware enough to be cynical, with its outrageous slings and arrows it could be a grandfather to Voltaire’s Candide. But Pericles doesn’t enjoy the season-anchoring repute of…

THE LOVE CONTINUES [Editor’s Note: To celebrate the work being done on intimate stages in Los Angeles, the Center Theatre Group (CTG) is producing Block Party at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. CTG received 76 submissions from intimate theatre companies throughout the L.A. area. Each company was able to submit one production that opened between January…

TITS AND SASS My only problem with 20 year old acrobats and showgirls is that they’re not going to date me while I’m in Las Vegas to catch a show. The casinos that hire them aren’t stupid; sexual frustration is the foundation of the gambling followed by cocaine followed by hookers tourism industry. I personally…

GOOD FORM AND OTHERS Most playwrights look like they’d rather kiss an ass than kick it. I like John Pollono because he looks like he came expressly to throw a beating, and so it is facile of me to observe that Pollono’s fun new play opened Thursday with the intention of knocking its audience around….

DEFENSIVE ACTION Richard Brinsley Sheridan learned the consequence of gesture earlier than most of us. At 21, he fought two duels with the same man over the same woman; having once spared his opponent’s life, he was skewered in their second duel and had his face pulped with the butt of a sword besides. At…

ALTERNATIVE FACTS Eugene O’Neill is one of those gigantically influential artists whom it is often difficult for later generations to enjoy. The innovations he cribbed from Ibsen and Chekhov can feel very dated now; they were a throwback even in 1956, when contemporary critics saw past the mean realism of Long Day’s Journey into Night…

THOROUGHLY THESPIAN Youth theater is mostly musicals, and many musicals are essentially infantilizing entertainments, most appropriate to teaching children how to perform. The kids themselves make up for a lot that I find unforgivable in book and music. In many kids’ shows half the cast can be expected not to have the choreography down pat,…

IMPRO FOR THE HOLIDAYS -dad- Family sucks. Spending time with the people you moved away from is so un-American, so anti-Manifest Destiny, such an embarrassing parochial guilt-trip, that it’s been relegated to the worst weather of the year. What we call the holidays are a “let’s get it over with” season of grown siblings reduced…

METHANE DEPOSIT A new play opened at the Geffen this week. It is called Icebergs, and it was written by Alena Smith. It was directed by Playhouse artistic director Randall Arney. It is a show illustrative of several tendencies in modern regional theater: It is written by a Yale-educated TV writer. Smith’s best work is…

LOVE STORY Watching 1984 live, in a roomful of high school students, my biggest surprise was how long two minutes lasts. I’m a hateful person now, and as a teenager even more so, but during Fairfax High School’s second period this morning, none of us could keep shouting epithets at Emmanuel Goldstein for even a…

AGITPOOP When Urinetown opened up Off-Broadway in  2001, then splashed all over Broadway just after 9/11, the show was hailed as a Brechtian revamp of musical theater. About an overpopulated, under-hydrated world in which private toilets are outlawed, Urinetown is a simultaneous assault on fascist economics and on mindless revolution. It’s supposed to be a black…