Jason Rohrer

I DID, TEN MINUTES IN Ike Holter’s play Hit the Wall, a historical “remix” about June 27 and 28, 1969 in New York City, went up first at the Steppenwolf in Chicago in 2012. The next year it went to New York, where it received mixed notices. A new production by LA’s LGBT Center has…

A HOMECOMING In last season’s Failure: A Love Story, Joseph V. Calarco played a veterinarian who at one point had to euthanize his good friend, a dog played by Gregory Nabours. The staged moment took less than five minutes, but remains as good an example as I have seen of the harmony of talent, skill…

CRITIC COVETS HEART It is unfair but true that in watching 24th Street Theatre’s American premiere production of Finegan Kruckmeyer’s Man Covets Bird, one automatically compares it to Debbie Devine’s last directorial effort here, Mike Kenny’s  Walking the Tightrope,  in 2013. That show won all the wins and toured all the tours, made everybody feel all the…

WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME …I would Love you ten years before the flood; And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews – Andrew Marvell It’s a measure of progress that a play about white people can be written by a black guy and directed by an Asian guy on what…

SOMETHING UNSATISFYINGLY APOCRYPHAL There are a few things that might not be entirely true about the Blank’s “World Premiere” of Jeff Tabnick’s Something Truly Monstrous, which opened last night in Hollywood. To begin with a quibble, a two-hour show by Tabnick called Barrymore’s Body, with what sound like most of the same elements, went up…

INHOSPITALITY IN A HOSPITAL A few weeks ago I spent a couple of nights at a hospital waiting for someone to be born. A couple of weeks later I spent a few more nights at the hospital, including time at the ICU, trying to keep the mother comfortable while she tried to stay alive. In…

ME NEXT TIME I’m running up Pico. It’s 7:54 p.m. and I just parked on Rimpau because I’ve only lived in L.A. for 18 years and Google Maps told me Theatre Theater was .1 mile from Rimpau, but it isn’t, it’s like 9 blocks, and I’m running. I was up at 4:30 this morning to…

LOS PECES VIOLENTOS There is a dark parable in the bible, in Luke or maybe John; it’s in the Scheherazade – the tale of the thousandth night, perhaps. Your translation didn’t have every night, anyway you didn’t read that far, but you almost know it. It’s in the Talmud. It’s a legend your grandmother used…

“DON’T LOOK AT ME” Jillian Leigh’s second play, Hooked, is extremely ambitious and fairly successful in the hands of director Terri Treas, producer Michael Zand, and a strong cast including the playwright. While the play could use another couple of drafts and at least one scene either more or less, and though the opening-night performance…

RAVE ON Almost a month ago, I went to Rogue Machine’s storytelling night for the first time. You know storytelling nights – they’re like poetry slams, only whiter and less political, and you can be incapable of a rhyme scheme and still do okay. Storytelling nights have replaced karaoke at hipper-than-thou bars, and public radio…

DISILLUSION ON DEMAND In Rob Mersola’s Luka’s Room, Nick Marini plays a blithe, typical, technology-addicted college sophomore who has a rough summer after his father stops paying Arizona State tuition. Luka has to move in with his senile grandmother (Joanna Lipari) and pot-dealer ex-con uncle (Alex Fernandez). The kid’s fall from an upper-middle-class dorm to…

REAL THING I hate it when people talk about the need to “support” a good cause. Guilt is simply bad salesmanship. It kills it for me. It killed Save-the-Whales, and it sure didn’t work in time for Cecil the Lion. I heard part of a KPFK pledge-drive recently that demanded a weep-track to underscore its…