Jason Rohrer

TO BE! (TRAPPED INSIDE YOUR OWN PRODUCTION) The explosion of solo performance pieces in the 1970s and 80s extended the creative lives of fine artists like Lily Tomlin and made stars of social philosophers like Eric Bogosian.   A show along the lines of Bogosian’s Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead avoided the ostentation…

EXPERIMENT SANS CONTROL GROUP In 2012, Tokyo-based company Faifai decided to bring its 2009 movement-and-language assembly Anton, Neko, Kuri to international audiences.   In a move she revealingly describes as “marketing,” director Chiharu Shinoda (with the help of stage designer Ayami Sasaki) imposed a huge projection screen dwarfing the four performers, upon which to project animated…

TWEE OF KNOWLEDGE New York downtowner Young Jean Lee’s 2011 rock concert-with-monologues We’re Gonna Die begins very well – at Wednesday’s Los Angeles premiere, a horrifyingly sad story had the audience breathless within a couple of minutes.   The show ends with a thoughtful flourish, choreographed with disarming physicality by Faye Driscoll and enthusiastically directed by…

WAITING FOR GODYSSEUS Consider the last four suitors of Odysseus’s grass widow, Queen Penelope of Ithaca.   Clad in Speedos, the men have gathered their dwindling numbers for the last twenty years at the Trojan War hero’s palace to feast themselves pudgy while their rival performs Homeric feats on his way home to kill them all.  …

OF KNOTS AND TANGLES Johnna Adams’ 2012 play Gidion’s Knot, now receiving its premiere Los Angeles staging by the Furious Theatre Company, lends itself to spoilers.   To know much about the fragile plot will reduce the thrill of watching it play out, so avoid reviews (except this one) and synopses (I don’t include one here)…

IS THIS A KEGGER I SEE BEFORE ME? The morning after the Thane has killed his king, and one of those epic, omen-riddled Shakespearean storms has ravaged the countryside, Macbeth snaps out my candidate for all-time champion literary understatement: “’Twas a rough night.”   But in a one-hour burlesque of Macbeth that brusquely acknowledges Shakespeare’s contribution,…

BIG HOGS AND HOT POCKETS We buy products because they consume us.   Ultimately our products replace us, because if you are what you eat, it follows that what you eat also is you.   And at that point, does the food chain even need you anymore?   Supernumerary to your own plans, it’s easy to end up…

HEAVENLY SAINTS PRESERVE US Ten days after opening night, Luis Alfaro still wasn’t off-book for his one-man confessional work-in-progress.   This matters because the moment when he leaves his lightly comic, heavily clichéd script, and whirls himself into performance-art dervish, it is transporting and beautiful; but there is only one such occasion in an hour and…

COUNT THIS SHEEP AND FALL ASLEEP As dull as its premise is exciting, Jaime Robledo’s production of Edward Einhorn’s 2010 play, adapted from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, could not be further divorced from its source. The novel is a philosophical visit to the defining boundaries of human nature, and…

YON METHINKS SHE STANDS Over the last year or so, some of my best time in an audience has been spent watching Paige Lindsey White.   Twice in collaboration with director Jessica Kubzansky at Boston Court, once with Debbie Devine at 24th Street, this actor has embodied the reasons I revere artists.   Sometimes portraying children, sometimes…

THE KEY OF IMAGINATION Many an actor, writer, and director settles for professionalism.   To get it up there and know your lines, to raise a question or resolve a story, to light the performers and make them audible: this seems enough.   And for some kinds of theater, journeyman work is completely adequate. But watching Impro…

SELFISHNESS AND SACRIFICE Alcestis is the old Greek story of a man who allows his wife to sacrifice her life for his.   As interpreted by Euripides, T.S. Eliot and others, it has much to say on the relationship between the mortal and the infinite. It is a reverie on egotism, love, mortality, personal redemption, and…

THE VOICE IN THE SILENCE Raiford Rogers has been choreographing dance for over thirty years.   He co-founded (with Victoria Koenig) the Los Angeles Chamber Ballet in 1981, known since Koenig’s departure as the Raiford Rogers Modern Ballet.   He has designed everything from pop moves for superstars (he never tells for whom) to sophisticated classical compositions.  …

YES, EVERYONE Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister were BBC television shows that ran on American PBS stations when I was a kid; I resented them for not being Monty Python, and dismissed them, and never thought twice about them until I heard Ron Bottitta was going to be in some kind of stage resurrection…

ME NO LIKE Brandon Baruch’s new play answers the question, What if a tedious dipshit got cloned? Failed actor and drunken doofus Tuck (Benjamin Durham) sponges off his girlfriend Gemma (Lizzie Adelman) until the result of a forgotten sperm donation, also named Tuck (Sto Strauss), knocks at their door. Afterward, the doofus mooches off both…