Tag archives: playwright
Indecent is a 2015 play by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel, inspired by the controversial events surrounding the play God of Vengeance by Sholem Asch. God of Vengeance was briefly produced on Broadway in 1923 before the producer and cast were arrested and convicted of obscenity due to the play’s depiction of lesbian love. Vengeance […]
Playwright James Still has authored several dozen plays over his long career, many of which focus on a combination of political, cultural, and personal topics, including The Velocity of Gary, Appoggiatura, and the much-translated, globally produced And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank. But his current passion project is one […]
Both the #MeToo movement and The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s allegory about the Salem Witch Trials to examine the McCarthy-Era Red Scare of his time,inspired playwright Kimberly Belflower to come up with John Proctor Is the Villain. “What would it be like to be a teenager in rural America at that moment, feeling the world shift […]
The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, the allegorical play by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis (Between Riverside and Crazy), already turns typical storytelling on its ear as it involves a courtroom trial over the ultimate fate of perhaps the most famous sinner in the story of the Bible. To examine existing understandings of heaven, […]
Santa Barbara playwright, director, and producer Rod Lathim has been hitting the Big Apple with his latest art exhibition Let There Be Light at the Kate Oh Gallery, just a tiara’s toss from the Ralph Lauren flagship store at the historic Rhinelander Mansion. The three-week debut show opened last month and Rod tells me they’ve […]
The poet, playwright, activist, and local elder for Santa Barbara County Black History, Sojourner Kincaid Rolle, has released a new book titled Free at Last: A Juneteenth Poem, illustrated by Alex Bostic, published by Sterling Books/Union Square Kids. This hardcover 10 x 10 inch 32-page poem/picture book tells the story of the end of slavery […]
The pandemic might have been a cause for pause for most of us, but Claudia Hoag McGarry took a different path. Not only did the screenwriter-turned-playwright take up watercolor painting – she’s created more than 575 pieces in 27 months, several hundred of which have sold online or, more recently, at Kathryne Designs in Montecito […]
Santa Barbara writer Claudia Hoag McGarry has been involved in the arts in town for more than 30 years, including teaching English Skills at SBCC for more than three decades, publishing three novels including two thrillers and a young adult memoir, producing four plays all in the historical drama genre, and writing screenplays and even […]
Sure, Christmas is almost a month in the rear-view mirror. Yes, Estella Scrooge, which takes place on a present-day December 24-25, is absolutely meant to be a Yuletide holiday story. But if you have yet to see this clever mashup of A Christmas Carol with several of Charles Dickens’ other books, now would be a […]
Ojai Theater Veteran Takes Stark Approach to Male Sex Organ Twenty-five years ago, a then-little-known playwright named Eve Ensler turned the theater world upside down with The Vagina Monologues, comprised of a stark series of stories told in first-person readings that explore experiences with sex, body image, reproduction, menstration, sex work, and many other topics […]
When the pandemic forced interaction to head to the internet, UCSB’s Theater Department quickly picked up the virtual ball and ran with it. Not only classes did move online but the Launch Pad project quickly pivoted to mark its 15th anniversary milestone by having previous participants in the play reading series contribute short pieces to […]
Prior to the arrival of COVID-19, veteran virtuoso playwright, performer, and pianist Hershey Felder had made a career out of creating and performing solo shows about composers Claude Debussy, George Gershwin, Frédéric Chopin, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Liszt, Leonard Bernstein, Irving Berlin, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky that have been seen across a wide range of […]
Actor-director-playwright Ed Giron has been a very busy thespian despite the limitations of the pandemic. Although in-person appearances have been curtailed due to COVID, of course, the well-known Santa Barbara actor has found, or mostly fashioned, frequent opportunities to perform and/or direct theater events online. Giron’s lockdown list began with recording himself reading “Bedtime Stories” […]
American Son, a play by Christopher Demos-Brown, already had a power-packed premise before recent events. On the night a teenage boy goes missing, his parents end up at the police station trying to figure out what happened while dealing with officers who aren’t the most forthcoming with information and assistance. While old wounds concerning their […]
Cheryl L. West’s plays have been performed on and Off-Broadway and on stages in England as well as myriad regional theaters across the U.S. including Seattle Rep, Arena Stage, Old Globe, The Goodman, Indiana Rep, Williamstown Festival, Cleveland Play House, South Coast Rep. Those venues have collectively produced some of her long list of titles […]
After the sensational success this spring of UCSB Launch Pad’s Alone, Together project that found more than 20 past playwrights-in-resident contributing short original works created to be performed and directed by theater students and faculty over Zoom, the 2020 Summer Reading Series: New Plays in Process might seem a bit anticlimactic. But don’t sell the […]
UCSB’s Launch Pad program began in 2005 as a grand experiment to offer a high-tech lab for playwrights-in-residence, UCSB theater students, faculty, and guest artists to collaborate in developing a new play each year. The residency culminates in a fully realized Preview Production, when the play completes its journey from incubation to professional world premiere […]
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 […]
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. […]
