News And Blogs

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

Dear Community Member, This month we have two terrific productions onstage that—in very different ways—use the art of theatre to illuminate key moments in our American history.

In Ancient Greek and Roman theatre, there were tragedies and comedies. During the English Renaissance, there was Elizabethan theatre. During the Spanish Golden Age, secular plays called comedias emerged. And in 17th century Japan, the kabuki tradition prevailed.

Taking Kabuki to the Taper

On February 19, 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which imprisoned over 100,000 Japanese Americans—about two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens—in one of 10 internment camps across the country’s westernmost states.

Ten Camps, One Executive Order

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