Theater

A TRAILBLAZING VOICE EMERGES It is tough to capture what Avaaz is in writing. On the surface, it is a one-person play in which author Michael Shayan plays his mother, Roya, a Jewish-Iranian woman who is quite a character. The narrative journey can be traced back to Roya’s father, Shayan’s grandfather, who was jailed for…

ASSASSINS SINGS! BUT THE COMPEXITY OF ITS THEMES GO MISSING ALONG WITH THE GUNS Assassins, with music and lyrics by the late Stephen Sondheim and a book by John Weidman, opened Off-Broadway at the Playwrights Horizon in the winter of 1990 and played seventy-three performances. Reviews were mixed to poor, applauding the music but questioning…

NOTHING IS MORE REAL THAN NOTHING — Samuel Beckett Dramatist Will Eno doesn’t make it easy on the audience in his 2012 play The Realistic Joneses at the Laguna Playhouse. Viewers are asked to decide whether the play is primarily a comedy or a sober view of the human condition salted with bits of the…

A LOVE LETTER TO AN IMMIGRANT FATHER Coleman ’72 is getting a fantastic world premiere production from South Coast Repertory. It is a melodrama about nostalgia, the immigrant experience, cross-generational trauma, and familial love. Told through the unreliable accounts of three siblings, this trip down memory lane brings up complicated family dynamics between each sibling…