News And Blogs

Despite a year of shutdowns and the closure of venues around the country, theatre has survived, and art continues to go on. That’s why we are honored to announce that Center Theatre Group has selected two winners of the Dorothy and Richard Sherwood Award—D’Lo and Mikaal Sulaiman, both multi-talented theatremakers, artists, and changemakers. �...

Meet the 2021 Sherwood Award Winners: D’Lo and Mikaal Sulaiman

For Kemp Powers, 2021 has already been quite the year—and it’s only February. After over two decades of writing, Powers has finally had the chance to experience what so many aspiring creatives can only dream about with the celebration of two debut screenplays. “It’s been surreal, to be honest. It’s weird to have your work out there...

Playwright Kemp Powers takes Hollywood by storm before turning to our Digital Stage

Mat Diafos Sweeney is a true multi-hyphenate creator: a composer-director-writer-designerchoreographer who makes theatre and performance pieces that defy easy characterizations. “I talk about the work that I make as ‘junkyard opera,’ both because of the different mediums that I’m working with in visual art and choreography and music and tex...

And the 2020 Sherwood Award Goes to…Performance Maker Mat Diafos Sweeney

“What’s it like to punch someone in the face?” playwright Ngozi Anyanwu asked mixed martial artist Ashlee Evans-Smith. They were sitting in the Kirk Douglas Theatre rehearsal room, where the 2019/20 L.A. Writers’ Workshop had just kicked off with its annual Salon. From a clinical psychologist and Jesuit priest to an anthropologist and Afric...

Behind Salon Doors

For any playwright, the opportunity to create and converse in a collaborative setting is a golden one. Especially unique is an environment as immersive and supportive as the L.A. Writers’ Workshop, now beginning its 14th year at Center Theatre Group.

Diverse Stories and Remarkable Talents

There are many key moments in a play’s journey to the stage: the initial idea, the first draft, the first rehearsal, the opening night. In the midst of these typically are numerous workshops, formal and informal, where actors, the playwright, and perhaps a director read and listen to the play aloud to see how it works as a piece of theatre....

Forging Plays, Building Community

This fall, the Center Theatre Group family, and the Los Angeles arts community, lost a longtime champion with the death of Dorothy Sherwood. To honor her contributions, we are renaming our Richard E. Sherwood Award—which Dorothy established in memory of her husband, the longtime President and Chairman of the Center Theatre Group Board of Dire...

Nurturing L.A. Artists and Honoring their Champions

A Tuesday afternoon in September found playwright and MacArthur Genius Luis Alfaro rewriting his newest work in an at once unlikely and completely appropriate setting: a Los Angeles public library parking lot in Boyle Heights.

A New Play Debuts in Boyle Heights

Center Theatre Group’s 2018/2019 Season—which we’ve called our biggest ever—is in fact too big to be contained by our three stages. We’re excited to share two innovative, boundary-pushing works with Los Angeles audiences in partnership with theatres around town, featuring the work of commissioned artists: Gob Squad’s Creation (P...

Join Us Off Center for Incredible Work Inspired by Incredible Works of Literature

Los Angeles has more theatre companies per capita than any city, and is a place writers flock to looking for opportunities across every form of media. But it can still be hard for playwrights to find one another and find support for their theatrical endeavors.

A Festival by Locals, For Locals

What do you do after you’ve adapted one of history’s greatest epics into a poignant, critically acclaimed one-man show?

From Epics to Clerics