News And Blogs

On August 17, 1978, Los Angeles theatre, Latino theatre, and American theatre changed forever with the opening of Zoot Suit at the Mark Taper Forum. “When the character of El Pachuco, memorably played by Edward James Olmos, swaggered onto the Taper stage, Chicano theatre became American theatre,” explained writer/director Luis Valdez. Valdez ca...

How 'Zoot Suit' Changed Theatre Forever

Deborah Stein and Suli Holum are the artists behind Stein | Holum Projects and the new play The Wholehearted, which makes its World premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre December 2–11, 2016. The Center Theatre Group Podcast sat down to ask them about the origins of this unique work that utilizes live projections, film, and a thumping score to tell...

Deborah Stein and Suli Holum Discuss the Origins of ‘The Wholehearted’

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