Jason Rohrer

TWO HOURS HATE While getting fitted for a hundred-thousand dollar suit, a gross presidential-candidate billionaire argues politics with his immigrant tailor. Several monologues inform the bigot that he’s a bigot. The billionaire threatens the Muslim tailor and his family privately and then, a few minutes’ stage-time later, incites violence against them on TV. Two and…

INCONVENIENT TRUTH A show as good as Blueberry Toast should be a city-wide phenomenon but it’s going up in Atwater Village, so not a lot of people from the West Side are going to see it before it closes next weekend. If you live in Glendale you have no excuse. But if you have to…

EAU DE MANCHESTER Kim Rubinstein’s new Odyssey production treats Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 A Taste of Honey not as a Chippendale museum piece but, smartly, as a serviceable old Sears sectional sofa. Rubinstein tarts up Delaney’s experimental kitchen sinker-cum-jazz cabaret confessional with an abundance of style. These are the basic choices for a director almost sixty…

FELLED Brimmer St. Theatre Co. only puts up a play when it thinks it’s got one worth doing, and always one that it has developed in-house. Some years it doesn’t produce anything but readings. This seems to me a better plan than that of many companies that fill ten slots a year with whatever they…

SUICIDE ISN’T PAINLESS My dad had a great record collection. At 16, I would drive over after school to smoke cigarettes and listen to Stan Getz. One afternoon I found Pop putting his affairs in order. The divorce had broken him. Whiskey had taken its own toll, and an ill-advised romance had sucked up his…

FENCES THIS AIN’T We are taught that tolerance is a virtue, that common ground is not only findable but a state of mind. We are taught that our obligation is to our neighbor as much as to ourselves. We learn in school, or in church, that home is the foundation of community. We know it….

YOU WANT  THE SLEUTH..? The kind of intimate theater I saw Sunday is targeted for elimination by Actors’ Equity Association: Low-tech projects, produced of donated resources without hope of profit. One of Equity’s arguments, repeated recently by its president, is that a proliferation of tiny nonprofits puts the development of commercial theater at a disadvantage. The…

TOWARD A SAFE THEATER In 2015 Bathsheba Doran’s The Mystery of Love & Sex opened to mixed notices Off  Broadway, which seems to be the exact pipeline for shows to get produced at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum a year or so later. It fits the bill for new-millennial regional theater production in pretty much every way:…

CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE STAGE Every time I see Leon Russom I wish I had his body. Lean like a dancer, he uses the solidity of his shoulders, the slimness of his hips to create character and emphasize moment. The Coen Brothers like to cast him as movie cops, but I first saw him onstage…

JUST ADD WATERS It’s edifying how much of practical value you can learn at the theater. I found out last night, for example, that if John Waters invites you over, you’ve got some work to do first: “You’re not taking a shit at my house. Dinner guests should eliminate before arriving. I don’t want you…