News And Blogs

To portray the vast canvas of American periods and locales on display in A Play Is a Poem—Ethan Coen’s World premiere collection of short plays onstage at the Mark Taper Forum September 11 – October 13, 2019—it takes a large and capable cast. In just under two hours, the action onstage goes from the East Coast to the West Coast—twice—an...

Play or Poem; It Takes a Village

From Appalachia to Hollywood, drama to comedy, A Play Is a Poem is a cross-country cross-section of American theatrical history. Consisting of five short plays of disparate settings and genres, the fundamental connection these pieces share doesn’t begin onstage. Rather, it all starts with over a decade’s worth of collaboration between playwrigh...

Collaboration, Cast, and Poetry: What Makes a Play?

In the midst of their June 5 – July 7, 2019 Ahmanson run, the company of Indecent celebrated their 300TH performance of this production, which has moved from New York to Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company and finally to Center Theatre Group over the past few years. A number of cast members, as well as playwright Paula Vogel and director Rebecc...

The Woman who Knows the Sounds of ‘Indecent’ Better than Anyone

From the earliest productions of God of Vengeance to the similar rediscoveries of the work by both playwright Paula Vogel and director Rebecca Taichman, Indecent represents the culmination of over 100 years of social, cultural, religious, and theatrical history. For greater context, here are some of the milestones of the creation and production of...

A Journey of Passion

It took 20 years—or 100 years, depending on how you count—for Indecent to get to Broadway. It all started in Poland in 1907, when a young Yiddish writer named Sholem Asch wrote a play called God of Vengeance. Or perhaps it all started in the stacks of the library at Yale Law School in the late 1990s, when a graduate drama student encountered th...

An Extraordinary Journey to Broadway and Beyond

There is a story we want to tell you.

There Is a Story We Want to Tell You

Center Theatre Group has a celebrated history of bringing playwright Samuel Beckett’s works to our stages over the last three decades, including a festival in 1990 that featured Play, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Happy Days. Upon that offering of the now legendary artist’s plays, Founding Artistic Director Gordon Davidson wrote, “Beckett’s play...

Are You Beckett Enough?

In an era of increased focus on social inequity and strife, Antaeus Theatre Company’s production of Native Son—onstage at the Kirk Douglas Theatre April 18–28, 2019—delivers a powerful message of what is possible when society and our communities fail to acknowledge the flaws in the system....

"Hard Medicine to Take"

Empathy is everything…

Empathy is Everything

Antaeus Theatre Company has always been known as a “classical” theatre company, featuring playwrights such as Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Shaw. But a question that fascinates, confounds, and inspires us is: What is a "classic?"

What is a "Classic?"

You may be familiar with the saying change is the only constant in life. While we deal with small, everyday changes without much thought, how we deal with major changes that challenge what we know and believe are the struggles that keep us up at night, and feature prominently in countless powerful plays. Such is the case with Skylight Theatre Compa...

A British Play Set in the Netherlands Comes to Los Angeles