Jason Rohrer

SHAKESPEARE WISHES HE WERE THIS FUNNY Mistaken identities, cross-dressing, puns, fart jokes and dick jokes and pussy jokes.   You know where you can find these?   Movies starring Saturday Night Live alumni.   That’s about how funny they are: they’re not.   And they’re about as funny as Shakespeare ever got.   The only people who buy tickets to…

PROMETHEUS BOUND In a production as stately and reverent as its subject was startling and rebellious, Philip Hayes Dean has directed his own one-man-with-musical-accompanist play to a standstill.   I don’t know how you’d do this if you wanted to: to reduce a renaissance man like Paul Robeson to the dusty subject of a mediocre history…

NOT EVEN GOD Hugh Whitemore’s 2001 play God Only Knows breaks some of the most basic rules of dramaturgy: a gun is introduced which does not go off; an argument is begun which is not finished; a story is alluded to but not played out.   A half-hour in, a character says “Let’s not have a…

CLASS ON THE FIFTH FLOOR The line on Los Angeles is that we’ve built the entertainment capital we deserve.   I needn’t go into detail here about our fabled shallowness and bad taste.   We know what we know about us.   But if you’d like to disprove the axiom that the only culture in L.A. departed for…

STILLED LIFE In 2007, Noël  Coward and David Lean’s 1945 film Brief Encounter, a somewhat maudlin expansion of the 1936 Coward one-act Still Life, was turned into a stage spectacle by Cornwall’s Kneehigh Theatre (a production commissioned by Cineworld, David Pugh and Dafydd Rogers).   In it, two happily married, middle-class British strangers fall for each other…

A HAPPY FEW, A HAPPY MANY Just about every Shakespeare production runs the risk of getting a packed house of high school students at least one performance in the run.   This situation is always touch-and-go.   On a bare black stage with a few chairs, as the Porters of Hellsgate often serve up their war stories,…

RICH AND BEAUTIFUL I like a play that vacuums the audience in the wake of its rocket so that we tumble after, happy travelers grateful for the bruises.   We bounce and roll along, too ecstatic to imagine stopping as the play flashes and bangs in our guts, in our faces.   But we can’t keep up…

YOU SEE A poet out of time, an ancient soul yet our contemporary, has come to sing to us of quarrel.   He comes shabby from the road, dusty and reluctant.   It is a killing effort for this gifted creature to tell us all we know of the love that causes rage.   His story is the…

AND HE DOES In the 1980s, Barry McGovern and Gerry Dukes collaborated to cut three novels by Samuel Beckett (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) into a few monologues, divided by lighting cues (James McConnell) and set changes (Robert Ballagh) and an intermission, called I’ll Go On.   Though spoken by different characters in their original form,…

UNFINISHED BUSINESS Son of Semele’s 4th annual Company Creation Festival presents new works by nascent Los Angeles troupes.   The festival’s first offering, Bunk, is what you’d expect from such a venue: a lot of youthful energy in service of a promising voice.   That the play doesn’t make much sense at this point may be less…

MY FAVORITE NIGHTS Looking back over a year’s playgoing, it’s every bit as easy to be jaded about little broke theaters as it is about big grant-eaters. Little broke theaters are constant trials of inconvenience for an audience member – you share a bathroom with the cast; you’re confused by the stage-house configuration; you have…

WINTER HIGH, WINTER LOW The Troubadour Theater Company opened a self-congratulatory love story Friday night, blowing a kiss to its own repertoire with its tenth annual holiday song-and-dance show at the Falcon.   (They have done more than ten holiday shows, but not all of them at Garry Marshall’s lovely theater.)   When some companies do this…

THE DEW ON THE GORSE In the 1960s, Beckett and Pinter started a vogue of shabby-old-man-reminiscing plays so influential that as late as 1995, Sebastian Barry went ahead and wrote one too.   But far from the esoterica of Krapp’s Last Tape or The Caretaker, Mr. Barry’s The Steward of Christendom is a cop’s-eye-view travelogue of…

FROM THE DECK OF THE H.M.S. CYNIC Remember when George Lucas took the awesome, mystical enigma of The Force and shrank it to the antiseptic science of midi-chlorians, essentially just a kind of microbe? A similar literalism has infected J.M. Barrie’s Never Never Land. Fairy dust has been replaced by star stuff, a sort of…

OVER THE DARK HARBOR WATER Walking a cold, mostly deserted Santa Monica Pier on the way to this show, I passed a photographer’s booth blaring the Azealia Banks song about “cunt getting eaten.”   A Brechtian juxtaposition: the family-friendly commercial beacon of the Pacific Park Ferris Wheel, reduced to a giant neon vagina inviting and enveloping…