Jason Rohrer

SUCCESS You have had at least one dream in which the universe of potential joy is realized in a moment. The moment is ethereal and tangible, in the way of dreams. For me this dream is always of a kiss. In the dream I am young and the girl I am going to kiss is…

SYNTHETICS AND STRUCTURE Excelling at stage picture, Jaime Robledo sets a lot of toys in motion in Sacred Fools’ latest offering, recently extended into  August. Robledo’s direction of Natsu Onoda Power’s 2011 spectacle Astro Boy and the God of Comics features scrims and screens, puppets, projections, live actors and plain old pen and paper, all interacting…

RHYMES WITH SIEVE In her play Shiv, the third part of an immigrant-experience trilogy first workshopped in 2013, Aditi Brennan Kapil writes of a character (played by Monika Jolly) named after a Hindu god most widely known as an agent of destruction. The girl’s troubled relationship with her poet father, and her subsequent involvement with…

THE AMERICANS Tracy Letts wrote a bleak comedy in 2007 that sold a lot of tickets, won a bunch of prizes and ensured his writing career at least a footnote in the big books. August: Osage County is about three generations of a familiarly fucked-up American family – you got your moral weakness, your addiction,…

THESE, OUR PLAYWRIGHTS Kinky Neon Rocker is one of those rally-round-the-flag excuses theater people use to put on shows: A beautiful old curved-wood rocking chair, painted in day-glo motley, features six times in six skits. Although six members of the Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights (ALAP) wrote a skit each, the writing is fairly consistent,…

HITCHES IN EXECUTION In his latest one-hour act, Simon Coronel divides the world into three categories: people who want to know how a magic trick is done, people who don’t want to know, and people who don’t care. I’m in category two: I want the suspension of my disbelief to be total and continuous. I…

HAROLD THE CONQUERING HERO Harold Pinter wasn’t an Ivory Tower practitioner who won a Nobel for writing twenty-nine shocking plays about morality and five or six books of rather precious poetry. He was a professional writer who also typed up (get my salts!) almost thirty movies, including some of the gold standard screenplays for literacy…

THE UNEXPECTED CUE Yasmina Reza is the most internationally popular playwright France has produced in a long time; certainly since Jean Genet, possibly since Molière. Her 1994 play Art, in which three friends debate the value of a white canvas, ran for eight years in London; when’s the last time Tartuffe did that? 2007’s adults-are-just-big-children…

THEATER OF WHAT THE FUCK As an impresario and creative force, the man who calls himself Zombie Joe is the envy of the North Hollywood arts scene. Largely on the remarkable popularity of Urban Death, its signature show now in the tenth incarnation since 2005, Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre Group operates year-round out of an…

RULIER THAN THOU I came to this show in a bad mood and left in a better one, which is as much praise as I can heap on a one-woman show about identity issues. There’s no theatrical fauna I want more sincerely to see on the endangered list, and none that looks less likely to…

THE CRAGS OF DELIVERANCE If bad reviews are the flattest line my pen can draw, a steppe of the imagination that writes its unsurprising self, a good review is the Caucasus. To critique Impro Theatre requires ice boots spiked with inked nibs. Frankly I’ve become fearful of seeing this company scale the heights of artistry,…

LUMBER Workshopped once onstage in 2000, Stephen Fechter’s The Woodsman had its play form set aside while Fechter and director Nicole Kassell turned it into a screenplay that won the 2001 Slamdance screenwriting competition. The 2004 film was about as good as most movies starring Kevin Bacon, whose luck cruelly runs out every time he…

A RIDE YOU WON’T FIND IN ANAHEIM Any neighborhood with the elevated name of Silver Lake should have freshwater dolphins and interesting old hotels and a disfigured serial killer who stalks the shrubbery on the anniversary of his parasailing accident. Instead recently on a steep pavement I witnessed this conversation between an attractive pedestrian and…

UP THE RABBIT HOLE There’s been a good deal of speculation over the last hundred-and-something years regarding the sexuality of Charles Dodgson, an Oxford professor of mathematics more famous for his writings under the pen name Lewis Carroll. Severally, storytellers Dennis Potter and Robert Wilson have investigated the subject; so have many market-minded biographers.  That Dodgson…

SAILING THROUGH FOG The title of Eugene O’Neill’s 1921 drama Anna Christie is the nom de guerre chosen by a hard-knock 18-year-old who decides that if she’s going to get pawed, she’ll damn well get paid for it. She hates men, God damn them, especially sailors, starting with the absentee father who entrusted her upbringing…

A YEAR OF ECSTATIC MOMENTS Last year, as ever, I missed what I am told was some of the best theater that went up in Southern California. I don’t know what’s Best or Most. I saw shows that knocked me out and shows that didn’t. It is always a profound inspiration to see people do…