News And Blogs

Almost exactly 101 years after Arthur Miller’s birth, Center Theatre Group is thrilled to be bringing the work of one of America’s master playwrights back to our stages to open our 50TH Anniversary Season. Our history with Miller began in December 1972, our sixth season, with a highly successful production of The Crucible starring Charlton Hest...

Arthur Miller Wows Center Theatre Group Audiences Once Again

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (onstage at the Mark Taper Forum September 1 – October 16, 2016) was written shortly after August Wilson moved to St. Paul, Minnesota in 1977. There, Wilson worked as a cook for a social services agency, earning $88 a week. It was enough money to give him the freedom to write, and from that freedom sprang the story of a...

Coming Full Cycle

Seventy-five playwrights have participated in the Center Theatre Group L.A. Writers’ Workshop since 2004. From the established wordsmith to the promising wunderkind, playwrights at all stages in their careers have spent a year with us getting support in the critical early stages of a new work’s development. There are only four requirements for...

Seven Writers Walk into a Room…

Lucy Alibar has made a name for herself for her distinctive and magical depictions of the American South through the eyes of young, female characters. First there was her Oscar-nominated screenplay for Beasts of the Southern Wild (co-written with Benh Zeitlin and based on Alibar’s play Juicy and Delicious). Now it’s Throw Me On the Burnpile and...

Lucy Alibar & Co.—Badass Women Writers of the South

Storytelling. Heat. Passion. Coffee. These were the sounds, smells, and feelings in Rehearsal Room C in The Music Center Annex over a weekend in early June, at the culminating retreat of the L.A. Writers’ Workshop. Each year, Center Theatre Group supports a small group of local playwrights as they research and write a new work while receiving fee...

2015/16 L.A. Writers’ Workshop Culminates in a Circus of Ideas and Stories

A writer exposes the anger and pain underlying his ethnic community’s post-war American experience through deeply flawed characters and cutting humor—bringing him equal parts adulation for his work and criticism for his portrayal of his people. This is the story of Ayad Akhtar and Disgraced, the most produced play in the country, which is onsta...

Ayad Akhtar Exposes Cultural Cracks