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

Five short plays wrapped into one evening, Ethan Coen’s A Play Is a Poem—onstage September 11 – October 13, 2019 at the Mark Taper Forum—celebrates the one-act play, a form that, over the last century, has endured the ebb and flow of theatre’s evolving landscape....

Revisiting the One-Act Form with Ethan Coen’s ‘A Play Is a Poem’

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?

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?

Music has always been the great bookmark of my life to tell me where I was and what I was doing, said Tony® Award-winning actor and Lackawanna Blues creator Ruben Santiago-Hudson. When I had been telling people about this incredible upbringing, I knew I couldn’t tell it without music.

Staging the Sounds of Blues

Creator Ruben-Santiago Hudson dedicates his autobiographical play Lackawanna Blues to the memory of Bill Sims Jr.

In Memoriam: 'Lackawanna Blues' Composer Bill Sims Jr.

When Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s Lackawanna Blues first premiered Off-Broadway in 2001 at The Public Theater, The New York Times lauded it as so humble and warm that the honesty of its spirit is never in question. That honesty was in part due to its directness: Santiago-Hudson was both playwright and solo performer embodying the people he lived along...

The Many Lives of ‘Lackawanna Blues’

Some might think the closest Center Theatre Group got to the Oscars was when the Academy Awards were hosted at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion just across The Music Center Plaza. But in fact, our audiences have come close to Oscar gold for more than 50 years, thanks to the countless Academy Award winners who have appeared in productions across our th...

Center Theatre Group Comes up Oscar Gold

Ian Barford—who plays the central character of Wheeler in Linda Vista—told us in a recent interview, “Having done second productions on several occasions, I must say that this one does not feel like a remount. It feels like a new production altogether.”...

Meet the Actors ‘Fearlessly Exploring the Human Condition’ with Tracy Letts

In a 2018 Q&A with Slate, Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and actor Tracy Letts said, I lie in all these interviews.

A Mostly Candid Tracy Letts on His Career Wins and Woes

Ian Barford has originated four roles in Tracy Letts’ canon of plays: Little Charles in August: Osage County (which he continued on Broadway), Ray in Mary Page Marlowe, Mr. Carp in The Minutes, and Wheeler in Linda Vista, which he steps back into at the Taper January 9 – February 17, 2019....

A Q&A with Ian Barford