Jason Rohrer

WHAT DIDN’T HE Joe Orton was a loudly subversive English playwright who, before his murder in 1967, helped rip out the loud, inefficient plumbing of kitchen sink social drama and replace it with something really dangerous: comedy. In a series of black farces, Orton substituted the Socialist Rape Victim for John Osborne’s Angry Young Man….

WHAT INDEED The title of Marí­a Irene Fornés’ 1989 quartet of one-acts recalls a two-verse Old Testament passage in Isaiah. The wandering Jews cry out from the midst of war, famine, every calamity: “What of the night?”, i.e. “What are our prospects?” The prophet returns: “The morning cometh, and also the night” – things will…

SWEET SONGS UNSUPPORTED Tarell Alvin McCraney’s 2012 Choir Boy is a tantalizing, underdeveloped play-with-music not entirely improved by Trip Cullman’s direction, now at the Geffen a year after the production’s Manhattan Theater Club bow. Jason Michael Webb’s tasteful vocal arrangements sound terrific via Fitz Patton’s crisp sound design, but the very assurance and gravity of…

YOU’LL GET THIS GOAT Martin is an architect at the top of his profession; he and his wife Stevie and their son Billy live at, or on, the crest of civilization: rich, successful, smart, loving, happy. Their journalist friend Ross is, if not an Olympian, a dweller on the slopes; they are all cultivated, delightful,…

HEAVENLY DAY Samuel Beckett’s 1960 two-hander Happy Days presents a life in hell: Winnie, a middle-aged lady half-buried in an apocalyptic wasteland, is awakened and put to sleep by a harsh, ominous, unexplained buzzer; a lecherous and monosyllabic cripple, her husband Willie is little help; her day consists of finding ways to not go insane,…

ALL YESTERDAY’S PARTIES A projection reads “1,000,000 Years B.C.,” and the countdown (count up?) begins; that’s a lot of numbers to scroll on a stage bare of performers, and it’s a few minutes of tedium before the counter gets to the 200,000s and a naked man (Sean Patten, in a blond Glam wig and fuck-me…

A SORT OF JUDGMENT The Life and Sort of Death of Eric Argyle, Ross Dungan’s 2013 play about fate-after-death, is pleasantly eloquent and several times touching in a comforting way, but it offers little structural or thematic originality. A quietly desperate nobody straight out of T.S. Eliot dies a bumbling death and has his life…

UNBURIED RED-HEADED STEPCHILD In the mid-1990s, Sam Shepard rewrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1978 play, Buried Child, for a new Steppenwolf production that director Gary Sinise dragged from Chicago to Broadway, where I saw and loathed it. It was a page-one, for-the-yokels rewrite, shrugging off the ambiguous Gothicism of the original to dress itself in frothy…

FORD INTO PECKINPAH VIA THE CHICKEN HYMN I’m a big fan of John Ford and Howard Hawks; My Darling Clementine and Red River are apex achievements in Hollywood studio storytelling. But Ford and Hawks were limited in ways that Impro Theatre is not. When Impro addresses the American Western as a system of philosophy and…

FIRST PERSIAN PLURAL To see the oldest extant Greek tragedy performed  sort-of  as it was 2500 years ago, but excluding masks and including Anne Bogart’s affection for fabric and yoga positions, you may now attend Aeschylus’s Persians  in a lovely amphitheater up in the Malibu hills. Essentially an after-the-fact ode to the Greek fighting spirit, delivered by a…

THE RUBRICS OF FAITH A play as well presented and satisfyingly written as most of Robin Uriel Russin’s new The Face in the Reeds deserves special mention. The Family Holiday Dramedy with Heart is normally a dismal category, rarely featuring characters this sharp or dialogue this funny. The genre has its limitations, and through prudence…

STRAWBERRY FIELDS I’m not sure what, but it says something about our young writers and aging audiences that the most durable millennial genre is the coming-of-middle-age medical trauma family drama.   David Lindsay-Abaire (Rabbit Hole, car accident), Jenny Schwartz (God’s Ear, drowning), Margaret Edson (Wit, cancer), Kathryn Walat (Creation, struck by lightning), Brian Yorkey & Tom…

ONE ACT IS COMPANY, SIX IS A CROWD Here’s the thing: an evening of one-act plays always reminds me of those Night of Scenes showcases back in school.   It’s a good chance for writers, actors, directors, and designers to work out, but for the audience…it’s a night of scenes.   So much can go wrong.   In…