Jason Rohrer

“TONGUES IN TREES, BOOKS IN THE RUNNING BROOKS” In order to make me laugh, a Shakespeare comedy must be well-cast.   This man’s musings on the darker territories of the heart have never been exceeded in 400 years; nobody has come up with a better picture of human frailty than Macbeth and Lear, and if you…

THIS ALMOST GREAT NIGHT Andrew Dolan, a working actor perhaps better known as a writer, had his second completed play produced first, in a Los Angeles world premiere: last season’s knockout EST production of his very smart race-and-academic politics piece, The Many Mistresses of Martin Luther King.   That play exemplifies all that is most promising…

THE FRIEND IN THE DARK Did you ever drive alone across a big, flat stretch of country at night?   You and your headlights and the asphalt spinning beneath like a long speckled treadmill – in a certain state of mind it’s easy to see the world as an Earth-sized ball rolling under your wheels.   Maybe…

A MESS IN BIG POCKETS Imagine yourself not exactly as JFK cheerleader Arthur Schlesinger Jr., but at least a 40ish New Deal Democrat, attending a John F. Kennedy rally in New York City in the summer of 1963.   You’re sympathetic to the president and his ideas, but you’re not one of the fresh-from-college, budding-hippie, personality-cult…

COMMUNION If the Ahmanson Theater is akin to a cathedral (elevated rules of decorum apply, and a certain dress code, and it’s expensive and showy in such a way as to invite your tithe and your awestruck adoration), the Glendale Centre Theatre is more like a Universalist meeting house that grew out of a commune,…

OF GOOD TURNS AND SCREWINGS All emotional reaction comes filtered through prerequisite knowledge: the sound of a crying baby is annoying, unless it’s your baby, in which case that sound may make you feel anything from relief (“It’s your turn, babe”) to terror (“I thought he was napping – that sounded like it came from…

THE IMPERFECT STORM Over lunch today, I tried to tell someone about Michael Elyanow’s new take on the Medea myth and found myself crying into my tikka masala.   The material is horrifying enough in the Euripides version: a witch, having lost the affections of the lover for whom she has sacrificed everything, kills his new…

RIGHT UP HALF-BAKED ALLEY Keith Stevenson’s writing in Out There on Fried Meat Ridge Rd. unsteadily walks a line between high and low comedy, veering more often toward sit-comism.   More skit than play, this quasi-story tells of a redneck saint who uses doe urine for cologne (Mr Stevenson) and the bottom-feeders he attempts to redeem…

TAUGHT BY MASTERS William Faulkner might or might not have quipped that Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies he’d ever met.   Faulkner definitely did call James both priggish and among the best of novelists, and even if the old-lady line proves spurious, it sounds enough like both of them that one wishes…

GRIEG, INTERRUPTED The Pianist of Willesden Lane features world-class piano playing, a moving story, a performer who has mastered the art of the former but not of the latter, and a director who can’t tell the difference. About ten years ago, pianist Mona Golabek wrote with Lee Cohen a children’s book about Golabek’s mother, Lisa…

REVEALING JUDY HOLLIDAY If you really never cared about Judy Holliday, because you only know her from grating performances in unsophisticated 50’s movies, you’re not alone.   (Turns out she may have hated them more than I.)   And I was warned that Concealing Judy Holliday is built upon the somewhat familiar premise of a deathbed fever…

DRINKS ARE QUICK Corey Womack has produced and stage-managed my two favorite Shakespeare shows of the past year, and so to me she is among the most able and important people working in the American theater.   True, more famous names may bring the classics to Southern California stages.   But from Peter Hall’s uninspired Midsummer Night’s…

LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NATURALISM Much has been written about Eugene O’Neill’s decision to trade first names with his own dead brother Edmund when naming the younger Tyrone brothers in Long Day’s Journey into Night.   The autobiographical play about the family of a fading actor was after all so personal to the writer that he…

YOUR OLD-AGE HOME FOR THE CLASSICS Julia Rodriguez-Elliott’s production of Moliere’s The Bungler reminds me of nothing so much as the last two shows I’ve seen at A Noise Within this season.   It’s not bad.   It respects (not to say reveres, puts on a pedastal, suffocates with solicitude) its text, and presents it in an…