Jason Rohrer

ABNORMALLY REAL When you avoid musicals as strenuously as I do, after a while you wonder why.   For some time I decided that it was the generally trite treatment of serious issues, a gripe which doesn’t hold up to analysis given the works of Kander & Ebb, among others.   For years I was sure my…

HISTORY AS MYTHOLOGY AS ROCK AND ROLL Dan Dietz’s American Misfit is the kind of smart, provocative entertainment that stimulates the best part of an audience: its appreciation.   As produced by the ever-resourceful Theatre @ Boston Court, this play furiously delineates some mixed results of the American experiment with historical footnotes that illuminate our present…

NOT YOUR RANK-AND-FILE PRODUCTION No getting around it: Robert Massey’s Rank is talky and familiar.   Without a top-flight cast and director, this show could easily be lost in the vast amount of Los Angeles theater that gets staged as if it would rather be filmed for cable television.   But in its American premiere at the…

THE WILDE ACCORDING TO BURBANK By Los Angeles standards, Theatre Banshee’s The Importance of Being Earnest is pretty good.   It’s a time-tested script; the actors know their lines, the director knows where to find the laughs, and one efficient, mostly lovely set by Arthur MacBride serves as three.   But two of those three settings feature…

HOWLER Steve Yockey’s new play isn’t new, and it isn’t a play. The first contention first: Part of a new promotional concept of “rolling world premieres” designed specifically to hype theaters and the scripts they mount, Wolves already played in Atlanta, New Orleans, and Tempe last year. This isn’t a tour; it’s four different productions…

GO GET LOST IN AUSTEN I drove to Jane Austen UnScripted directly from a production of Oklahoma!  as grand and empty as the wind sweepin’ down the plains.   With a quarter of the cast of that Rogers and Hammerstein show, and a tithe of the expense, seven Impro Theatre actor/writers showed more integrity to the spirit…

WAY TOO EARLY PLAYS Imagine you’d never heard of the Wooster Group, and that you knew nothing of the avant-garde theater’s storied history, or its origins in the downtown scene of 1970s New York that revitalized the American stage, or its famous founders including Spalding Gray and Willem Dafoe.   And suppose you didn’t know who…

IN THE SHADOW OF STARS David Wiener’s ten-year-old, never-before-produced play Cassiopeia needs work.   As usual at Boston Court, this experimental piece has received a production so grand that it more than warrants seeing.   Also typical of Boston Court, this challenging show is so sharp that it highlights the weaknesses of its script, such that Mr….

AVOIDABLE MADNESS There’s a show running right now at a smaller venue of a state-of-the-art West Side arts complex.   It’s a foreign import, a one-woman show that, in a different format as Ruby Wax: Losing It, has spent years touring asylums with its garbled message of exculpatory hope for those suffering mental illness.   Because the…

CRACK YOUR CHEEKS By placing himself in the charge of his fickle children, old King Lear abandons the security of his own reason to wander an inhospitable wilderness. Â  It’s a fitting metaphor for a venerable script at the mercy of a production lacking the chops to do it justice, and for an audience perched for…

VOLUBLE Once in my earnest youth I dogged a homeless man around lower Manhattan for a whole night, from his steady gig panhandling the car line into the Holland Tunnel through four hours’ can collecting.   I was under the influence of undergraduate-level brother’s keeperism and would not be put off by the man’s clear discomfort…

PLEASE SIR, WE WANT SOME MORE SeaGlass Theatre only does one show a year, which is remarkable, since they’re such a spirited bunch.   For instance, it’s a shame to miss Paul Stroili any time he’s onstage: I’ve seen him do outrageously good work in good productions, like the last SeaGlass offering, Steven Berkoff’s Kvetch –…

A PRO-CHOICE ARGUMENT Michael Michetti’s staging of Kathryn Walat’s Creation will, I hope, long hold the record in my experience for Most Literal Production.   This decidedly non-realistic play does much to invite such a treatment: its awkward, unhelpful structure features many redundant soliloquies (a trope in which the director has his actors engage the audience…