“Department of Dreams” by Jeton Neziraj
Translated by Alexandra Channer
October 25 – December 8, 2019
Fridays, Saturdays 8:00pm: Sundays 3:00pm
Critic’s Choice! — Los Angeles Times
The world premiere of Kosovar playwright Jeton Neziraj’s nightmarish, Orwellian comedy of an autocratic government that demands its citizens deposit their dreams in a central, bureaucratic depository so that it can exert the fullest possible control of their imaginations. In this vast, underground complex, civil servants like Dan, a new hire for the prized job of Interpreter, sift patiently through the nation’s dreams looking for threats to the government’s authority and its version of “truth.” If order is to be maintained, deviance must be extinguished and imagination co-opted. Dan works hard and tries stubbornly to survive in this strange dream world but finds nothing is as it seems to be except the authority that rules it. Don’t miss the world premiere of this new play from one of Europe’s most remarkable playwrights.
“Theatre should side with the victims” feature on Jeton Neziraj — Stage | The Guardian
“The premiere represents a coup for City Garage’s founders, artistic director Frédérique Michel and producing director Charles A. Duncombe, whose company has been presenting edgy theater for more than 30 years. Michel, who also directs, and Duncombe, whose typically stunning production design is a highlight, do full service to Neziraj’s savagely topical, darkly funny piece.” — F. Kathleen Foley, Los Angeles Times
Read Stage Raw’s interview with Jeton Neziraj: Kosovo’s Molière: Mocking Hypocrites and Autocrats
“The cast entire does the fine job I frankly have come to expect from City Garage, with Frederique Michel’s direction showing wonderful insight…” — David MacDowell Blue, Night Tinted Glasses
Special Events: Weekend of November 8 – 10th, 2019
City Garage is thrilled to announce that playwright Jeton Neziraj will be traveling from Kosovo to join us for a weekend of special events around this world premiere. Support City Garage and help us meet our goal of $25,000 for this fall by being part of this exciting weekend. Tickets for all events are $50 each. Or pick a performance of your choice, then attend as many of the after-show events as you like—up to all three—for $100. Book your tickets through this link:
Friday, 11/8: Champagne Reception and Book Signing: Meet the author, mingle with cast and crew, and have your script signed (copies of “Department of Dreams” available at $25).
Saturday, 11/9: Catered Reception: Join us for dinner after the show, along with the playwright and other special guests of honor.
Sunday, 11/10: Panel* Discussion: Steven Leigh Morris, editor of Stage Raw, will moderate a discussion on “Theatre and Politics.” How can—or should—theatre address the urgent political realities of its moment? The particular focus is on the rise of autocracies in Europe, the Balkans, and the west in general, and the role of the arts in contemporary politics. Q&A with the playwright and panelists to follow.
*Panelists: Steven Leigh Morris, Moderator, Editor Stage Raw; Dr. Mietek Boduszynski, Assistant Professor of Politics at Pomona College; Viktorija Lejko-Lacan, Department of Slavic East-European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures UCLA; Lauren Murphy Yeoman, Assistant Professor of Theatre, USC School of Dramatic Arts.
Limited Seating! Get your tickets now!
“Eurydice” by Sarah Ruhl
“Macbett” by Ionesco
There will be a reading of “Macbett” by Ionesco on Sunday, August 25 at 6:00pm.
Directed by Ann Bronston. Free.
“Eurydice” by Sarah Ruhl
Champagne Preview August 9
Opening Saturday August 10
Pulitzer-prize nominee Sarah Ruhl stands the Orpheus myth on its head and retells it from Eurydice’s point of view. Comic, tragic, silly and poetic in turns, this inventive play follows Eurydice as she does her best to adapt to life in the underworld.
Abandoned by her self-absorbed poet-lover, she rides elevators, has long conversations with stones, defends herself against suspicious men, and finds comfort in the companionship of the ghost of her dead father, though, to his sorrow, she cannot remember who he is. She struggles to recall what it was to be alive and who she was. At last, her easily distracted lover arrives to deliver her. Or will he?
“There’s a sort of beautiful simplicity to the production which makes it feel like a story of a couple who just happen to be dealing with the underworld. Rather than epic, it feels oddly, awkwardly human. It’s a Greek myth scaled down to human proportions. Instead of an all too perfect tragic love story between an untouchable young couple, it becomes the story of a woman who has a creepy guy hit on her on her wedding day. It’s simple, it’s quiet, it’s deeply personal. While this “Eurydice” sidesteps the grand gestures what it gains is simpler story of a woman who’s facing a hostile world with a husband who’s distracted, a man who keeps harassing her, and a world filled with rules to keep her life small. City Garage’s take…lets you hear the play and taps into a vein that feels honest and a bit raw.” — Anthony Byrnes, “Opening The Curtain” KCRW
“What Ruhl does, and this wonderful cast does under the direction of Frederique Michel, is focus not upon Orpheus but what this story means from Eurydice’s point of view….Words alone by a playwright rarely haunt or move. They are meant to be acted out, and this cast captures the eerie and quietly human voyage of these characters. City Garage can and often does perform outrageously stylized works. They do these so very well. But my favorites have always been when the simple life of the characters shine through, the decisions and consequences and experience of what is happening. Eurydice counts as one of my favorites from this company, because even a Stone, even a God, still seem somehow human. The humans meanwhile make me ache for them. Especially the title character, due in larger part to the actor who portrays her.” — David MacDowell Blue, Night Tinted Glasses
“Director Frederique Michel, designer Charles A. Duncombe, and videographer Anthony Sannazzaro—and of course the gifted cast—work considerable stage magic with Ruhl’s slight, whimsical, but (at times) charming play. I came away feeling glad I had seen it.” Will Manus, Total Theatre
“Eurydice is a whimsical, often thoughtful exploration of memory as life and loss of memory as death. There’s much more than a tragic love story here. Ruhl’s combination of Becket and Alice in Wonderland leaves a stream of thoughts trickling through your brain long after the flood of images has subsided.”
-Oakland Tribune
Fourth Weekend Q&A: Informal discussion with the cast, crew and director Sunday, September 1st, after the 3:00pm performance.
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the California Arts Council, and by the City of Santa Monica and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
“The Bourgeois Gentleman” by Molière
Translated and adapted by Frédérique Michel and Charles Duncombe
Extended! Now through April 14th!
February 22 – April 14, 2019
City Garage revives its smash-hit production of Molière’s classic comedy The Bourgeois Gentleman. A Critic’s Choice in the LA Times, a Pick of the Week in the LA Weekly and nominated for numerous awards! Don’t miss the return of this madcap, silly send-up of upper class pretenstions and noveau riche aspirations!
Wealthy and foolish Monsieur Jourdain is in love with the Countess Dorimène and aches to be what he is not — a member of the aristocracy. Determined to overcome his low birth with an education in high style he unwittingly surrounds himself with charlatans and swindlers who gleefully take his money and prey on his innocence. Ingenious servants, pedantic masters, devious nobles, and earnest young lovers all propel this delightful satire of nouveau riche social climbers. And, in the end, is the “nobility” to which Jourdain so ardently aspires all that admirable?
In this acclaimed translation by Frédérique Michel and Charles Duncombe the play is re-imagined for contemporary audiences, transporting us into an extravagant fantasy world of song, dance, and upper class nonsense.
“THE BOURGEOIS GENTLEMAN had the audience laughing from start to finish… This witty tale about the nouveau riche is bound to continue to make audiences gasp for air.” — Ilana Lifshitz, Broadway World.
“Molière’s equal-opportunity satire skewers nouveau riche pretension and aristocratic snobbery in this revival of City Garage’s acclaimed 2008 production. Featuring choreography and music inspired by the original 1670 staging but adapted and re- imagined for the present by director Frédérique Michel and designer Charles Duncombe, the piece charts the risqué antics and misadventures of a social- climbing fop manipulated by con artists and ne’er-do-wells.” — Philip Brandes L.A. Times, The 99 Seat Beat
“This sleek City Garage take on Molière’s satire of nouveau riche pretensions in nominally avante-garde but mainly an ungaurded hoot. Director Frederique Michel and Designer Charles Duncombe slyly tailor our times into their tart adaptation….a gracefully loopy soufflé.” Critics Choice, LA Weekly (2009)
Joins us for a special Champagne Preview on Friday, February 22th with complimentary champagne, or for the Opening Night Gala, on Saturday, February 23th with buffet. Buy your tickets for any night of the run before February 22nd and get 30% off!
Fridays, Saturdays 8:00pm; Sundays 4:00pm
Tickets/Box Office: 310.453.9939
Buy the book on Amazon.
This project is supported by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the LA County Arts Commission, the City of Santa Monica and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
“Winter Solstice” by Roland Schimmelpfenig
The West Coast premiere of Winter Solstice by Roland Schimmelpfenig.
translated by David Tushingham
Oct. 19 — Nov. 25, 2018
Q & A with the director and cast, Sunday November 11th, following the 4:00pm performance.
For a long time the far right hid in the shadows. Now it no longer needs to. This witty, incisive and ultimately chilling new new play looks at the seductive re-emergence of fascism from the German perspective — a perspective few can share with such dread.
Five people gather on Christmas Eve in a bourgeois, intellectual household. Albert, a writer, is engaged in a ferocious spat with his wife Bettina, a film-maker, over the arrival of her mother, Corinna. But it is Corinna who sparks the dramatic crisis by inviting a man she met on the train, Rudolph, to stay with the family. Rudolph is urbane, civilized, and polite—the essence of cosmopolitan charm. He entertains everyone by playing Chopin and Bach on the piano, but when he reveals that he is a doctor with Paraguayan connections, we realize that he is the silken embodiment of a Nazi past Germany has long thought buried.
The West Coast premiere of this transfixing, razor-sharp new comedy from acclaimed German playwright Roland Schimmelpfenig powerfully demonstrates the unnerving logic of the new right and the seeming impotence of liberalism to combat it. Highly cinematic in style, naturalistic and surrealistic by turns, the play exerts the same hypnotic spell as its menacing visitor—an insidiousness that makes him, in Schimmelpfennig’s eyes, a lethal threat.
“As choreographed by director Frederique Michel, it succeeds, adding not only a lot of dark humor but a mounting suspense….cool, acerbic humor….a familiar, chilling ideology. How is it that fascism, so easy to dismiss in theory, leaves its opponents so helpless when it knocks on the door, smiling and cultured and reasonable? It’s a question we’ve all had plenty of opportunities recently to ask, and fail to answer, and it lends a gripping urgency to this well performed dark comedy.”
— Read Margaret Gray’s full review at LA Times
“A subtle political allegory….Superb acting….Frederique Michel’s clockwork-like direction of Schimmelpfennig’s tricky, provocative play and Charles Duncombe’s atmospheric stage design also deserve the highest praise possible.” — Read Will Manus’s full review at Total Theater.
“To be topical, yet subtle. Intensely focused on an issue yet without preaching. On top of that, to achieve the surface below which boils and dances currents of dangerous passions–doubt, loneliness, love, hate, guilt, lust, horror, fear.” — Read Zahir Blue’s full review at Night Tinted Glasses
“Why this?: …City Garage specializes in provocative, challenging material that would rarely be attempted elsewhere in L.A. … the company’s typically artful design sensibility [is] well-suited to the play’s sharp pivots between naturalistic dialogue and surreal narration.” — Read the full preview at the LA Times!
“The timing is perfect…. The idea that we show hospitality to our destroyers is as old as drama itself…. Schimmelpfennig, in portraying the failure of liberal intellectuals to confront the hideous legacy of the past, has written a potent play for today.” —The Guardian
“A rare and delightful play… the family drama, richly comic, accurately skewers a wide spectrum of human behavior… Schimmelpfennig’s ominous underlying message [is] Who – or what – has taken up residence in our lives without our really noticing?” —The Evening Standard
Join us for a special preview with complimentary champagne, Friday October 19, or for the opening night gala, Saturday, October 20 with buffet.
A 1940s Christmas at Club Sweet Lorraine’s
Join us at a Christmas Eve after-hours 1940s nightclub where celebrity guests Billy Eckstine, Eartha Kitt, Marlene Dietrich, Peggy Lee, Dorothy Dandridge, the Mills Brithers, and many more are coming to celebrate Christmas Eve and Sweetie’s second year as owner of Club Sweet Lorraine’s. Come sing Christmas songs with the stars in Sharon L. Graine’s nostalgic 1940s cabaret musical. One day only! December 9th at 3:0pm and 7:00pm.
“The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” by Bertolt Brecht
Translated by Jennifer Wise
June 29 — August 12, 2018 at City Garage
The Great Depression in 1930s Chicago. Unemployment. Fear. Graft and corruption at City Hall. What do you need when society starts to fall apart? A strong man who steps in to take control. Arturo Ui, a small time gangster with an insatiable appetite for power, convinces a panicked population that no one has the answers but him. He and his cronies will provide the protection you’re looking for: even if you don’t know you’re looking for it. Brecht’s 1941 satirical masterpiece classic about Hitler’s rise to power in 1930s Germany demonstrates, with a savage blend of comedy and pastiche, how demagogues take power and how easily—and willingly—democracies become autocracies.
“City Garage.. is the ideal local company to revive this infrequently done, disturbingly timely play.”
‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’ at City Garage
The essentials: Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 satire, which he wrote while in exile from Germany and waiting for an American visa, has been described as “the American gangster movie meets Richard III.” The play’s account of a buffoonish, small-time Chicago racketeer who takes over the city’s cauliflower market is a thinly veiled and often savage parody of Hitler’s rise to power.
Why this? As Charles Isherwood wrote in Variety about a 2002 New York production, “ ‘Arturo Ui’ paints a blunt picture of a smug society easily corrupted and ultimately overtaken by a low-level hoodlum and his gang of thugs.” Does this sound at all familiar? Is it too soon? Or maybe too late? City Garage, known for daring, highly stylized sociopolitical theater, is the ideal local company to revive this infrequently done, disturbingly timely play.
— Margaret Grey, The Los Angeles Times
“Is there a through line from Capone’s Chicago and Hitler’s Germany to the current Washington interregnum? Director Frédérique Michel and producer Charles Duncombe make a good case in their City Garage production of Bertolt Brecht’s THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF ARTURO UI, featuring a very strong performance by Andrew Loviska in the title role.”
— Barlo Perry, ParisLA
“There are plays that are both timeless and timely and The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui is the best possible choice The City Garage could have made of the lot of them….City Garage makes good use of Wise’s rapid-fire and engaging translation with a cast that embodies all things 1930-40s Gangster with strong physical choices and a bevy of accents that are impressive and delightful.”
— The Theater Times
“Arturo Ui shows us precisely how yes It Can Happen Here. Worse (in some eyes) how it already has. More than once…
City Garage’s production captures many of the tricks and skillful theaticalities Brecht worked into his plays.” — David MacDowel Blue, Night Tinted Glasses.
Schedule:
| Runs: | Fridays, Saturdays 8:00pm; Sundays 3:00pm |
| Bergamot Summer Day on July 21st. Special 4:00pm show. Pay what you can at the door or regular prices at Brown Paper Tickets if you want to reserve ahead of time. Food trucks, music, and art events all day. | |
| Closes: | August 12, 2018 |
| Admission: | General Admission: $25; Students/Seniors $20 |
| Group Rate: | (Groups 10 and over) $15. |
For more information: Contact Charles Duncombe, Producing Director Charles@citygarage.org
“The School for Wives” by Molière
February 23 – April 1, 2018
(No show Saturday, March 10th)
Extended! Friday April 6th, Sunday April 8th, Friday April 13th, Saturday April 14th, and Sunday April 15th!
By Molière, translated by Frédérique Michel and Charles Duncombe.
In Molière’s comic masterpiece Arnolphe, a rich merchant, is under the delusion that he can create the perfect marriage for himself by creating the perfect wife. He raises a young orphan, Agnes, from infancy, determined to keep her ignorant of everything except what he teaches her. As the play begins, he is about to marry her at last, or so he thinks, until the young woman skillfully turns the tables on him. In this award-winning translation by Frédérique Michel and Charles Duncombe City Garage remounts its acclaimed 2009 production with a contemporary twist that speaks to the issues of patriarchy, gender, and power in the “Time’s Up” headlines of today.
“Delightful…almost dance-like…the humor is nonstop…Roberts’s performance touches our hearts.”
— David MacDowell Blue, Night Tinted Glasses
TOP TEN – Recommended!
“Director Frederique Michel relies on an elegant new translation she’s written in collaboration with producer and designer Charles Duncombe, with a staging that emphasizes the artificiality of Moliere’s comedy with balletic, stylized movement. The result is crowd-pleasing and consistently funny. As Arnolphe, Roberts captures the quintessence of male arrogance, egotism and insensitivity, which makes his growing desperation hilarious and leaves us longing to see him get his comeuppance. Pida brings the asset of real youth (she’s a high school senior) to the ingénue role of Agnes….Jaime Arze and David E. Frank score as a pair of dimwitted servants, and Troy Dunn is smoothly insinuating as Arnolphe’s friend, Chrysalde. The handsome set departs from the play’s 17th century time period; Duncombe chooses instead to set the action in “a time when such things happen,” using a modernistic flavor. Josephine Poinset provides the clever and stylish costumes.”
— Stage Raw
WEEKEND PICK! – LA TIMES
“This comedy, considered by many to be Moliere’s greatest, concerns a controlling guardian who has carefully cloistered his decades-younger ward in the hope of transforming her into the “perfect” (and perfectly ignorant) wife who will never stray. Controversial in its day, the premise seems abhorrently timely now. Dedicated avant-gardists Frédérique Michel and Charles Duncombe have devoted their theatrical careers to defiantly alternative theater. Their well-regarded translation of “Wives,” first produced at their theater in 2009, brings an invigoratingly revisionist perspective to Moliére’s classic.”
— Los Angeles Times
“The central character in Molière’s comedy, newly translated by Frederique Michel and Charles Duncombe, could be and often is a punching bag. But not here…. The play emerges less as a clown show and more as a wistful, almost elegiac rumination on aging and folly.”
“Go!” — LA Weekly
“This new translation/adaptation of Moliere by director Frederique Michel and Charles A. Duncombe is clever, colloquial, and far more actable than most recent versions.”
— Backstage
Buy the Book!
This best-selling translation is available from Amazon.
Moliere’s The School for Wives: A New version in English by Charles A. Duncombe and Frederique Michel **CITY GARAGE BEST SELLER** This translation is being used in university courses.
Purchase the book from Amazon
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
“Carmen Disruption” by Simon Stephens
September 8 – October 15, 2017
I’ll gather my breath. I’ll walk out of my room. I’ll know exactly where I’m going to go. The voice in my head tells me exactly where to go.
An opera singer lost in the city. A gorgeous male prostitute. A tough-talking taxi driver. A global trader. A teenage dreamer. Everyone’s looking for something they can’t find in this US premiere from acclaimed British playwright Simon Stephens (Heisenberg; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) whose strange and beautiful play re-imagines Bizet’s opera Carmen and explores the possibility of love in a fractured urban world.
“The Singer,” a mezzo-soprano who criss-crosses Europe playing the title role in ‘Carmen’ has arrived in an unidentified city to do so again, but a random incident causes her already nebulous sense of self to start unravelling. Carmen, here a busy “rent boy,” has a disastrous encounter with a client that shakes his sense of self. Don Jose is a taxi-driving mother pining for her son. Meanwhile, a suicidal young girl, dumped by her boyfriend, is the bereft Micaela, and a corrupt futures trader assumes the role of Escamillo.
These are lonely souls, yearning for love, home, a sense of self and real connection in an age of superficial digital communication and narcissistic, illusory identities. Simons uses broken shards of Bizet’s opera to fashion a mosaic of monologues about our infatuation with technology and digital communication, less a recreation of the opera than a deconstruction of it, reflecting on the strangeness of a professional singer’s life and the aching disconnection at the center of our atomized contemporary world.
“Shattering and reimagining our notions of theatre… Carmen Disruption reminds us how thrilling it can be to see a fresh take on a familiar tale…” -The Guardian (London)
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
“≈ [Almost Equal To]” by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
![“≈ [Almost Equal To]” by Jonas Hassen Khemiri](https://citygarage.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Almost-Equal-To-2831.jpg)
How much do you earn? Who do you serve? The new world economics is built on inequality that threatens us all.
This remarkable new work from one of Sweden’s most celebrated novelists and playwrights takes on this issue in highly personal terms: a young man from an immigrant background trying to find his first job; a professor of economics desperately trying to hold onto the one he has; his wife, who nurses fantasies of an ecologically responsible life in the country; a homeless hustler who might be more than he seems; and a young woman who, in the cut-throat world of her office, may or may not be responsible for the death of a rival co-worker. Think economics is strictly for academics?
This play, with its unforgettable moments of funny and brutal honesty about the human cost of a rigged system, will make you think again.
Third Sunday Q&A:
After the 3:00pm performance on Sunday, June 11, please join us for an informal discussion with the cast and crew.
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
“Adam & Evie” by Charles L. Mee
March 24 – April 30, 2017
Much of our life is spent coupling, uncoupling, or recoupling. We’re obsessed by love and sex: how to get it, how to keep it, or how to get out of it and try again. In this new work, multiple-award-winning visionary playwright and poet Charles L. Mee looks at love from Adam and Eve to our own rapidly changing times where the possibilities of thwarting yourself in love expand with every new boundary we cross.
Third Sunday Q&A:
After the 3:00pm performance on Sunday, April 9, please join us for an informal discussion with the cast and crew.
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
“right left with heels” by Sebastian Majewski
“Director/choreographer Michel and designer Charles A. Duncombe have created a marvelous evening of theater.”
July 8—August 14, 2016
right left with heels recounts the story of the Holocaust and post-war Poland from the ironic perspective of a pair of high heel shoes that once belonged to Magda Goebbels, wife of Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda. The shoes, who may have inherited her racist point of view, tell their own story: from their manufacture in Auschwitz to their tragic end on the feet of a transvestite murdered by contemporary Polish “patriots.” Magda Goebbel’s wandering shoes provide a poignant and provocative insight into individual guilt and wickedness, and addresses accountability in the face of history from the end of WW II to today’s frightening rise of the new right.
Fourth Weekend Q&A July 31:
There will be a discussion with the cast and creative staff Sunday, July 31 after the 3:00pm performance. Don’t miss it!
LA WEEKLY: GO! (click here to read full review)
Staged by Frédérique Michel with her customary bold and bawdy panache, the production features two female performers, Lindsay Plake and Alexa Yeames, who, dressed in teasing red and black costumes by Josephine Poinsot, cavort provocatively about the stage while saucily recounting a history of loss, pain and terror.
STAGE RAW Recommended/Our Top Ten! (click here to read full review)
…Director/choreographer Michel and designer Charles A. Duncombe have created a marvelous evening of theater. Their style is a distinctive, individual form of dance-theater, using a movement vocabulary that, in the present case, communicates immediately with gestures sometimes like seductive cabaret performance, always with a sense of the pair operating like a single organism — or like female acolytes in a wicked ritual. Those familiar with past productions will recognize common elements of design (hues of red and black in the costumes, vivid graphics as a backdrop) —the elaboration of a singular theater-language…
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
