News And Blogs

The weekend of November 5–6, 2016 marked the kickoff of Center Theatre Group’s 2016/17 Los Angeles Writers’ Workshop. The seven participating playwrights came together at the Kirk Douglas Theatre for a Salon weekend featuring conversations with local experts—selected by the playwrights individually—on the subjects of their plays. We asked...

Playwrights, Professors, a Politician, and a UFO Researcher Meet at the L.A. Writers' Workshop

Throughout the summer and early fall of 2016, Center Theatre Group’s artistic staff worked hard to prepare for the 20 productions that will play our Los Angeles stages in the upcoming season. But they were also traveling 2,500 miles across the country to New York City to participate in workshops and readings of nine different plays and musicals i...

The Center Theatre Group Plays you Haven’t Heard of—Yet

When playwright and MacArthur “Genius” Luis Alfaro was a child, his mother would bring him to shows at the Ahmanson Theatre and Mark Taper Forum—but she would wait in the parking lot of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power while he sat in the audience, enraptured. Alfaro became an usher in 1979 and eventually became part of Center Th...

The Local Theatre Movement

Google Martin McDonagh—whose play The Beauty Queen of Leenane is onstage at the Mark Taper Forum November 9 – December 18, 2016—and you very quickly learn a few things. One is that in 1997, he famously (and drunkenly) cursed off Sean Connery. (Which is true.) Another is that in that same year, he became the first playwright since Shakespeare...

The Irascible Irish Genius of Martin McDonagh

June 26, 1996—20 years ago this year—August Wilson ascended the stage at the national conference of Theatre Communications Group, the national service organization for professional theatres, to deliver the keynote lecture. Wilson had long been one of the nation’s most eminent playwrights, and the audience of theatre community members from acr...

The Ground on Which I Stand

In politics, it’s cliché to say that “image is everything,” but in Jon Robin Baitz’s newest play—which is set to have its World premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre October 23 – November 20, 2016—image is the only thing. At the center of Vicuña is a real estate tycoon and reality TV star turned presidential candidate and his tailor,...

A World Premiere Ripped from the Headlines