Tag archives: plays
When the coronavirus caused shutdowns in California in mid-March, the married couple who run the Rubicon Theatre Company thought at first that maybe the Ventura outfit could just wait out the virus, postpone a couple of shows and get going again later in the spring. When it became clear that the Ventura venue wouldn’t be […]
Katie Laris wasn’t moved much when she took in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time on Broadway back in 2014. Despite having enjoyed the original 2003 novel by Mark Haddon that is narrated in the first-person perspective by Christopher, a 15-year-old boy afflicted by unnamed Asperger syndrome, the veteran SBCC Theater professor […]
Carey Crim finished her original draft of Never Not Once – which gets its area premiere at the Rubicon Theatre Company this weekend – three months before the revelations about Harvey Weinstein exploded into the #MeToo movement in the fall of 2017. “So it became unexpectedly – and unfortunately – timely,” the playwright said over […]
On the surface, What Martha Did might seem a strange choice for Launch Pad, UCSB’s innovative model of new play development that serves as a high-tech lab for playwrights-in-residence, UCSB theater students, faculty, and guest artists. The darkly funny drama about regret, facing the truth, and finding forgiveness features largely middle-aged characters, a bit of […]
To the uninitiated, the Lucidity Festival, which offers its eighth iteration this weekend, might still come off as a haven for hardcore drug users, a three-day escape for spaced-out revelers intent on leaving reality behind. But maybe that mistaken notion will finally be put to rest, as Lucidity was recognized as the world’s best family-friendly […]
Tony Award-winning playwright Simon Stephens (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) wrote Heisenberg a couple of years after TV’s Breaking Bad anti-hero Walter White stared down another major meth manufacturer in the Arizona desert and demanded that his rival say the criminal’s nickname that had made him the DEA’s fictional enemy No. […]
On the Verge (OTV), Santa Barbara native Kate Bergstrom‘s repertory theatre company founded in 2015 with a mission of marrying new work created by female and LGBTQ writers with the local community of actors, directors, producers, and theater-goers, is taking a slight detour for its fourth year. In place of presenting several different plays in […]
ON STAGE by the SBHS Forge Staff It’s a Monday morning, two weeks before opening night, and Otto Layman, the head of Santa Barbara High School (SBHS) Performing Arts, surveys a stage where an array of people and tasks occur simultaneously: students are painting or hanging lights under the guidance of lighting designer Mike Madden […]
The saga of George Christie, Jr., from a Hell’s Angel head man to star of a one-man play based on his own life would be something almost beyond belief if it weren’t actually true. Christie, who was born in 1947 in Ventura and returned more than three decades later to found the Ventura chapter of […]
Gaby Moreno moved from Guatemala to Los Angeles at 18 to pursue a career in music, and really never looked back. Not even musically, at least not for almost a decade. The singer-songwriter who blends blues, jazz, ’60s rock ‘n’ roll, and Latin American influences into something she calls “Spanish folk-soul” fell in love with […]
Anthony Giardina‘s 2010 play The City of Conversation has proven to be even more prophetic than even he might have imagined. Set in Washington, D.C., during three important periods in recent American politics, the play spans nearly 30 years, from Fall of 1979 to January 2009, and traces the evolution of 1960s-raised Hester Ferris from […]
