News And Blogs

Storytelling. Heat. Passion. Coffee. These were the sounds, smells, and feelings in Rehearsal Room C in The Music Center Annex over a weekend in early June, at the culminating retreat of the L.A. Writers’ Workshop. Each year, Center Theatre Group supports a small group of local playwrights as they research and write a new work while receiving fee...

2015/16 L.A. Writers’ Workshop Culminates in a Circus of Ideas and Stories

The name “Ivo van Hove” doesn’t flow off the tongues of Angelenos yet—but it will soon. (For the record, it’s pronounced “EE-vo van HOE-va.”) The 57-year old Belgian director of A View From the Bridge, which plays the Ahmanson Theatre September 7 – October 16, 2016, has been called avant-garde, minimalistic, provocative, and groundb...

Meet Ivo van Hove

We’re thrilled to congratulate renowned director/choreographer Sir Matthew Bourne, who was knighted for services to dance by the Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace on May 20, 2016.

Director/Choreographer Matthew Bourne Is Knighted

Samuel Beckett wrote plays and poetry, novels and short stories, criticism and nonfiction, TV scripts and radio teleplays. But despite coming of age alongside the art of cinema, he was not a filmmaker. With one notable—largely forgotten—exception: in 1964, seven years after the premiere of Endgame (which plays the Kirk Douglas Theatre thro...

Samuel Beckett’s Adventure in ‘Film’

On June 5, 1951, a Latino African-American surfer named Nick Gabaldon paddled 12 or 13 miles north from the Santa Monica-Venice border to the Malibu Pier—a journey that cost him his life. Gabaldon had taught himself to surf at the Ink Well, a section of beach at the end of the Santa Monica Pier reserved for African-Americans; he couldn't sim...

Richard Montoya and Roger Guenveur Smith Excavate ‘American Venice’

Samuel Beckett once wrote, “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” So it might be a little odd to imagine him joking with a friend about translating his book Pour finir encore et autres foirades as “Wet Fart” (It was published in English as Fizzles). However, even a cursory glance at Beckett’s life wil...

Will the Real Samuel Beckett Please Stand Up?