Diversity Tops the Agenda at Los Angeles Theater Network
Of course, the big elephant in the room is the bitter conflict between AEA minimum wage and local actors working in the 99-seat theater scene. Any discussion of theater at this time must indeed necessarily center on the local scene’s current struggle for existence. As group chair Jon Lawrence Rivera noted, LATN is neutral on the AEA feud, on the grounds that LATN chooses to deal with issues of advocacy and marketing instead of the casting concerns of individual companies. Still, on their Facebook page, the group has hosted equally shrill diatribes from both sides of the issue. BY PAUL BIRCHALL
Paul Birchall’s Got it Covered: From Brian Kite at UCLA to an Aborted NYC Mikado to Bloomberg Foundation Largesse to the 20 Most Produced Playwrights of 2015-16
Brian Kite, producing artistic director of La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts, is stepping down to take over the Department Chair at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Still quite a young artist, Kite has already had an illustrious career, with credits from the Actors Co-op to the French Woods Festival in New York (where he served as director of theater programs for more than seven years) to the Geffen, and he has certainly had played a strong leadership role at La Mirada – not to mention is position of board chair at Los Angeles Stage Alliance.
Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles; Tartuffe by Moliere: A Reality Show; A Flea in Her Ear; and The Object Lesson
It’s a strong ensemble, A Noise Within’s longest suit, but arguably no one could resist its spasms of inspired wackiness. Camille, afflicted with a speech impediment that cannot pronounce consonants, the sort of convention no longer permissible without air-quote irony, is here so inventively incarnated by Rafael Goldstein that the disorder transcends issues of political correctness. To a lesser degree, the stereotype of jealous Spanish husband with a pistol is nearly as well overcome by Luis Fernandez-Gil’s zealous embrace of all the ridiculousness of the role. Contrastingly, the ever-versatile Joshua Wolf Coleman instills an insinuating quality as an ambiguous doctor in the first act that one wishes paid off more heartily than the way in which the script strands him.--BY MYRON MEISEL
Paul Birchall’s Got it Covered: From Monday Nights at Rogue Machine to Awake and Sing! to Jennie Webb
Odets’s play is a bit of a standard amongst theater folks of a vintage lefty sensibility — and there have been many productions of it between these two Odyssey stagings — but given the current economic iniquities, as well as the sentimental reasons for honoring a theater company that has been able to make a go of it for so many decades, this should be a show well worth coming out for.
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