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.
