Productions

Othello, in the midst of an identity crisis, examines and rejects his status as a servant of the Venetian State. Hungry for political power, he experiments with the idea of self-identifying as white. Desdemona, a Lolita trapped in a caged bed, is a spoiled brat with a mind of her own and a hunger for fame. She’s still deeply in lust for the lover she’s lost, while he struggles with racism and white privilege. Egged on by Iago, hovering like a punk-rock bird of prey, and a sassy, transgender Emilia, this is a love story that, just as in Shakespeare, is going to end badly.

The West Coast premiere of this widely-acclaimed recent text. In Lear, experimental playwright Young Jean Lee’s self-described “inaccurate distortion” of the classic, she banishes the title monarch and most of the other male characters to the wings and focuses instead on the younger generation: Lear’s three daughters and Gloucester’s two sons. The absurdist, meta results are irreverent, grotesque, and morally harrowing.

Two Hamlets wander a bizarre, absurd and devastated political landscape from the fall of Communism to the ascendancy of ISIS. Their journey starts as they board the locomotive of the Revolution with mad Uncle Karl at the wheel. Round and round and round they go, at each stop, the bloody disasters of the 20th century, like the stations of the cross for a long-suffering humanity.

Welcome to the glitzy, gaudy Beverly Hills mansion of the delightfully deluded businessman Orgon Pernelle. He rescues a homeless hustler from the street who pretends to be a pious preacher, but his family sees what he doesn’t see: a masterly con-man. His trophy wife, his rebellious, spoiled children, and his naughty maid all want the cunning pervert to be thrown out. Step by step, the imposter Tartuffe seduces his victim until the man is ready to sign over everything he owns to him—all in the name of purifying himself spiritually! Will Tartuffe get away with it or will the family expose his evil scheme?

What if God told you to be a better person but the world wouldn’t allow it?

Such is the dilemma facing Joe Smith, a run-of-the-mill white-collar businessman who survives an office shooting and is subsequently touched by what he believes to be a divine vision.

What happens if someone unexpectedly tells you that you are running out of time and exactly how much you have left? What does it mean—for her and the others?

A fish drops from the sky and a lonely middle-aged man is launched on a magical and emotional journey across four generations of family wrestling with the awful legacy of a secret buried deep in the past.

In this award-winning drama from Australian playwright Andrew Bovell, each of the characters is trapped in a longing they cannot bear. They reach toward each other, tentatively, uncertainly, but time after time fail to connect.

Orlando, an angry young military officer, bitter about his low rank, blames his misfortunes on his uncontrollable sex drive and his marriage to Leticia, his uneducated wife. Determined to rise within the regime of an unnamed Latin American country, he becomes addicted to the dirty work of torture and interrogation.

Over the course of a mysterious, hallucinatory night, the Devil and his entourage pay a midnight visit to Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov, whose recent work Molière has just been shut down by the authorities. By magic, these characters, having escaped from Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, transform themselves and perform the play, transposing the playwright’s 1930s attack on censorship and hypocrisy in Stalin’s Soviet Union to the America of today: a government paralyzed by vicious partisanship and a society obsessed with celebrity. Is the Artist a revolutionary and provocateur or does the machinery of mass culture co-opt every act, even the act of subversion itself?