Jason Rohrer

BROADWAY VIA THE CATSKILLS AND THE ACTORS STUDIO I like plays featuring middle-aged guys who did everything right and still can’t figure anything out.   So Ron Sossi and Larry Field’s new production of Neil Simon’s 1986 Broadway Bound has a present for me in the character of Jack, the no-nonsense garment cutter whose wife and…

SWEET, DREAMY Based on the true story of a rabid blue-collar fan whose dream of making friends with her favorite Grand Ole Opry star came true in 1961, Always… Patsy Cline is an enormously successful 1990 jukebox musical written and “originally directed” by Ted Swindley.   In its latest incarnation at the El Portal through Sunday,…

AGONY UNVISITED In this play by Tim Livingston, apparently his first, an artist and self-proclaimed protagonist named Joey (played by the author’s brother Joey Livingston) complains in verse about his desire to make a living as a rapper; his antagonist brother Tim (an enthusiastic Keenan Jolliff), who “works in finance,” bitches in couplets and iambs…

A BLOODY BUT WORTHWHILE MESS When Kenneth Clark asked of William Shakespeare, “who else has felt so strongly the absolute meaninglessness of life,” he illustrated the point with this speech of Macbeth’s: Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time, And all…

DOOM DOOM DOOM In the Boom Boom Room is a David Rabe play that did not win a Tony in 1974.   In it, Rabe demonstrates no particular affinity yet for female characters, of whom there are many.   It is not subtle or quiet, but few Rabe plays are.   In angry, long-winded street poetry, inarticulate folk…

GODDAMN CHEKHOV, AGAIN I suspect nobody really likes The Seagull except theater people.   It established for the modern age some of the essential playwriting untouchables:   a play about actors and writers, and plays, in which the value of art is a major theme?   In which not only is acting used as a metaphor for human…

SOBER CANNIBALS, DRUNKEN CHRISTIANS This show made me wish I had chosen to sit through Lost Moon Radio’s Million Dollar Hair again. If this sounds like faint praise, it is; I did not enjoy Million Dollar Hair.   But Moby Alpha, as conceived and performed by Seattle sketch comics Chuck Armstrong and Charlie Stockman, is unfunny…

ITHACA John Perrin Flynn and Brenda Davidson’s production of Penelope is so vivid that it’s hard for me to imagine the play in any other presentation – even though I’ve recently seen another  that had its own strengths.   Flynn’s direction is unequivocal, authoritative.   He finds the excitement and narrative drive carefully laid underneath Enda Walsh’s impossibly…

COMFORT CANCER Steven Dierkes has written the play one thinks of writing after a friend gets a brain tumor.   Like a character in Land Line, I once was a guy who talked long-distance day after day to a sick friend who’d had to move back into his parents’ house; if you live long enough, you’re…

IMPORTANCE AND FRIVOLITY Radically altering the circumstances of a revered text is the prerogative of any new production.   It’s one of the methods theater reserves to drag fusty old plays into the present.   And if you look at the Queer Classics version of The Importance of Being Earnest as taking place in a Sartre-esque vacuum,…

LOST Lost Moon Radio’s new Hollywood Fringe Festival show is by far the least impressive Lost Moon outing I’ve seen.   A departure from their usual late-night free-form radio show format, Million Dollar Hair has a fine enough conceit: it more or less purports to be a piece of musical theater (book: Frank Smith, Ryan Harrison…

THE RISE AND FALL OF A TRANSFERRED PRODUCTION When it was originally presented at Sacred Fools, Vanessa Claire Stewart’s play had a subtitle (The Rise and Fall and Rise of Buster Keaton), but Stoneface Productions and the Pasadena Playhouse have dispensed with that (along with a few scenes), which is good because Stoneface is a…

BRIGHT LIGHTS ON A DIM HORIZON Two hit men wait in a shitty Vegas motel for the boss to give them a goddamn call.   One of ’em (Leon Russom) is an all-business, no-shit guy on the verge of retirement; the other (Garrett Michael Langston) is a congenital fuck-up first-time gunman twitchin’ to get in over…

DEARTH OF DRAMA Steven Drukman’s Death of the Author takes its name, premise, and some of the devices in its dialogue from a Roland Barthes essay on postmodernism.   It’s wonderful to see Drukman adapt Gore Vidal’s riposte to William Buckley about crypto-Nazis and fold it into a pun on Marxist literary theory.   But there’s nothing…

THEATRICAL ANTHRAX In Ellen McLaughlin’s 2011 play Ajax in Iraq, a heroic American soldier, A.J., is raped by her sergeant.   Her Iraq War story parallels that of the Trojan War hero in the Sophocles play, Ajax (elements of which are plonked down atop the contemporary thread): contempt for one’s fellow man in the horrors of…

ON A SEA OF TEARS It’s a play that deals with AIDS, and the central character is a little boy.   Okay?   So while Coeurage Theatre Company (like many who have produced David Saar’s The Yellow Boat since it was first published in 1997) says that it’s appropriate for ages 8 and up, you’ll have to…

TITTY GARAGE Shows that are listed at two hours and fifteen minutes shouldn’t be forgiven for running three hours, unless they are written by a genius like Mikhail Bulgakov. One of that early Soviet dissident’s plays is in fact embedded in Charles A. Duncombe’s new play, sort of, but it’s a dream version that takes…