2016 | Center Theatre Group

Center Theatre Group Carpenter Kate Harrow builds, loads in, repairs, and strikes scenery for shows at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Downtown Culver City. Watch her review plans, work with wood, and handle a pretty big saw in our latest Working in Theatre video. She also talks about her education at USC, her big break in summer stock, and what it’s...

The Carpenters who Set the Scene

“Los Angeles is a city where, in many ways, it is hard to connect with other human beings,” said Center Theatre Group Director of Social Strategy, Innovation and Impact Leslie Johnson.

Creating Connection Through Community Conversations

Parents are our best cheerleaders and (sometimes) our greatest adversaries—a contradiction that artists have explored (and exploited) for as long as there has been art. Playwrights are no exception. Among the most terrifying theatrical mothers is Mag in The Beauty Queen of Leenane (which played the Mark Taper Forum November 9 – December 18, 201...

Eight Theatrical Mothers We’d Need to Tell Our Therapists About

Ask a Parisian what the greatest place on Earth is and you can be pretty sure of the answer you are likely to receive—and rightly so. Paris is special. Its boulevards and spirit have inspired artists of every cloth to create some of the world’s greatest works of art—including the creators of Amélie, A New Musical, which plays the Ahmanson Th...

Nine Times Paris Came to Broadway

Deborah Stein and Suli Holum are the artists behind Stein | Holum Projects and the new play The Wholehearted, which makes its World premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre December 2–11, 2016. The Center Theatre Group Podcast sat down to ask them about the origins of this unique work that utilizes live projections, film, and a thumping score to tell...

Deborah Stein and Suli Holum Discuss the Origins of ‘The Wholehearted’

The weekend of November 5–6, 2016 marked the kickoff of Center Theatre Group’s 2016/17 Los Angeles Writers’ Workshop. The seven participating playwrights came together at the Kirk Douglas Theatre for a Salon weekend featuring conversations with local experts—selected by the playwrights individually—on the subjects of their plays. We asked...

Playwrights, Professors, a Politician, and a UFO Researcher Meet at the L.A. Writers' Workshop

Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane (November 9 – December 18, 2016 at the Mark Taper Forum) takes place in the eponymous Leenane, a town in the mountains of Connemara, County Galway, Ireland. For introductory purposes, one only need know that Leenane is drab, perpetually wet, and generally lacking in activity and jobs. The language u...

A 'Beauty Queen of Leenane' Glossary

Since our founding in 1967, Center Theatre Group has been sending shows to Broadway. Our very first World premiere at the Ahmanson Theatre, the musical The Happy Time from songwriting team John Kander and Fred Ebb, directed and choreographed by Gower Champion, and starring Robert Goulet and David Wayne, transferred to The Broadway Theatre, and rece...

From Center Theatre Group to Broadway

Throughout the summer and early fall of 2016, Center Theatre Group’s artistic staff worked hard to prepare for the 20 productions that will play our Los Angeles stages in the upcoming season. But they were also traveling 2,500 miles across the country to New York City to participate in workshops and readings of nine different plays and musicals i...

The Center Theatre Group Plays you Haven’t Heard of—Yet

Garry Hynes has been breaking new ground in theatre since the 1970s, when she, along with two friends from the National University of Ireland, founded Druid in Galway—the country’s first professional theatre company to be based outside Dublin. Two decades later, Hynes discovered an unsolicited script in Druid’s inbox by a young, unknown playw...

Groundbreaking Director Garry Hynes Is Back

“I believe that, right now, art can do something that is harder for the media to do,” Jon Robin Baitz has said of his new play Vicuña, which makes its World premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre through November 20, 2016. Baitz’s tale of a presidential candidate and his tailor is in excellent company this election season, which has galvanized...

Theatres and Theatre Artists Respond to Election 2016