Put a Little Drama in your Life
PAT LAUNER TIMES OF SAN DIEGO 3/30/15 There was plenty of passion – of the political and sexual kind – and more than a dollop of warm, oozing sensuality in “Passion and Honey,” an evening of poetic musings by writer/director Calvin Manson, produced under the banner of the Ira Aldridge Repertory Players, which he founded 31 years ago. Manson is trying Read More →
Pat Launer, Center Stage on KSDS JAZZ88 March 27, 2015 “Anna in the Tropics” is a very hot play… set in a steamy 1920s summer in sultry, South Florida. In a close, confining cigar factory, workers retain their old Cuban custom of having a Lector read to them -- to pass the time, decrease the routinized boredom and expose Read More →
Pat Launer, Center Stage on KSDS JAZZ88 March 20, 2015 Sophocles comes to the barrio. Well, not the ancient Greek playwright himself, but his most famous, 2500 year-old creation, “Oedipus Rex,” one of the most profound and enduring tragedies of Western literature. In “Oedipus El Rey,” acclaimed L.A. playwright Luis Alfaro has brought the ancient Read More →
PAT LAUNER TIMES OF SAN DIEGO 3/17/15 Talk about your Extreme Makeovers! There was never a sculptural re-molding of a human lump of clay like the Greek Metatmorphosis myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, brilliantly refashioned by George Bernard Shaw into the play, “Pygmalion” (1913), which then underwent another transformation, into the magnificent Lerner and Lowe musical, “My Fair Lady.” The book and lyrics may be credited to Alan Jay Lerner, but many of the lines were penned by that Read More →
PAT LAUNER TIMES OF SAN DIEGO 3/15/15 The arc of relationship is traced in “Kin,” by English-born, New York-based playwright Bathsheba Doran. Actually, it’s the arc of multiple relationships. At first, the drama (spiked with comic moments) seems like a pastiche of duets, each pair at a certain point in their bond as friend, parent or lover. But gradually, we Read More →
PAT LAUNER TIMES OF SAN DIEGO 3/14/15 Playwright Christopher Durang loves to shoot holes in sacred cows, from religion (“Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You”) to Chekhov (“Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike”). In 1983, he took aim at parenthood, in “Baby with the Bathwater,” which hasn’t been seen in a professional San Diego production for decades. Read More →