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.
