The Price Opens! (LAArtsOnline.com)

The Price runs at The Mark Taper Forum February 11- March 22

The Price Opens!

By Ken Werther

When discussing legendary American playwright Arthur Miller, the first words that come up are Death of a Salesman, the watershed, historic winner of the 1949 Tony Award for Best Play and Pulitzer Prize for Drama that introduced the American everyman Willy Loman to the world. Almost 20 years later, The Price opened on Broadway and New York Times critic Clive Barnes called it “…one of the most engrossing plays that Miller has ever written.” The Price has been revived on Broadway three times since its Broadway debut and it was adapted for television in 1971 and nominated for four Emmy Awards (winning two).

The Mark Taper Forum is reviving The Price, a play that has been described as a poignant story about the cost of choices made over a lifetime. Even with its impressive production and award history, this beautiful play is one of Arthur Miller’s lesser known. I’ve read but have never seen it and I am truly thrilled that I can be there on opening night to finally take it in. Directed by Tony Award-winner Garry Hynes, the Taper cast will feature actors with combined accolades and awards too numerous to count; you really can’t do much better than Kate Burton, John Bedford Lloyd, Alan Mandell and Sam Robards.

I’ve been going to the theatre since I was a very little boy and sometimes I still get amazed by how many classic American plays have escaped me. Thanks Mark Taper Forum and here I come!

The Price plays at Mark Taper Forum, located at 135 N. Grand Ave, from February 11 to March 22.

“What the Butler Saw” (LAArtsOnline.com)

www.laartsonline.com/theatre/
By Ken Werther
Graphics Courtesy of CTG

Twisting plot lines, mistaken identities, slamming doors, blackmail, sexual innuendo, subversive wit, and an outrageous lack of appropriateness… you’re talking my kind of entertainment! Joe Orton’s full-throttle farce What the Butler Saw is the last play written by England’s legendary playwright before his untimely death in 1967 at age 34. Center Theatre Group brings us this comic masterpiece as the last production of the Mark Taper Forum’s 2014 season.

The original production of What the Butler Saw opened in London on March 5, 1969. The play, a timeless tale of sex and repression in a culture gone mad, was decried at the time as scandalous for its character’s raging libidos and rampant mockery of morality. In spite of a small body of work that also included television and radio plays, Joe Orton emerged as one of the seminal playwrights of the 20th century—a direct successor to Oscar Wilde, William Congreve, and Noel Coward. Orton’s other well-known plays are Entertaining Mr. Sloane and Loot, which were presented in repertory, directed by John Tillinger, at the Mark Taper Forum in 1987. Tillinger, a leading interpreter of Orton’s work, returns to direct the savagely funny Butler.

For me, there is nothing more delicious in the theatre than a great farce impeccably directed and performed, and it doesn’t happen often enough. This play is one of the best. I’ve got my tickets and I’m ready to laugh!

What the Butler Saw runs November 12 – December 21 at the Mark Taper Forum.