City Garage Classics

City Garage Classics, videos of many of our past performances, are available to our supporters to watch on demand! If you are already a supporter, you can go directly to the City Garage Classics page.

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2016 “Lear” by Young Jean Lee

West Coast Premiere

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.

2015 Hamletmachine: The Arab Spring

World Premiere!

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.

2015 Tartuffe by Moliere: A Reality Show

World Premiere!

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?

2015 “The Break of Noon” by Neil LaBute

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.

2015 “Timepiece” by Charles A. Duncombe

World Premiere!

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?

2014 “When the Rain Stops Falling” by Andrew Bovell

Los Angeles Premiere!

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.

2014 Maria Irene Fornes: The Conduct of Life

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.

2014 “Bulgakov-Moliere” by Charles A. Duncombe

World Premiere! "RECOMMENDED" - Stage RAW

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?

2013 “Moskva” by Steven Leigh Morris

World Premiere!

Moskva is a comic, macabre fantasy, based on the Russian masterpiece The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.

On a hot spring afternoon, the Devil and his entourage, trailing fire and chaos in their wake, emerge from the shadows of the underworld and weave themselves into the absurd and brutal realities of today’s Moscow. They encounter lovers, mafia king-pins, drug-dealers, hit-men, a crippled novelist, Pontius Pilate, Christ, and various bewildered apparatchiks of Putin’s Russia.

2013 “Opheliamachine” by Magda Romanska

World Premiere! "GO" -- LA Weekly

This smart, ruthlessly funny play, tracks Ophelia’s impossible journey to bridge that vast space. It is a postmodern tale of love, sex, porn, and politics in the fragmented world of our confused emotions and our modern, global, virtual sexuality.