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By LUIS ALFARO
Directed by JON LAWRENCE RIVERA

• At Playwrights' Arena in November/December 1999
  starring EMILY KURODA and JAMES SIE

• At Playwrights' Arena in January 2000
  starring NATSUKO OHAMA and JAMES SIE

• At Actors' Gang in February 2000
  starring NATSUKO OHAMA and JAMES SIE

TOP TEN OF 99 / CRITIC'S CHOICE
LA Times

CRITIC'S PICK / WINNER 2 GARLAND AWARDS
Back Stage West

BEST OF 99 / WINNER MADDIE AWARDS
Park La Brea News/Beverly Press

BEST OF 99
Frontiers


A mother. A son. Las Vegas.
Life's a gamble in Luis Alfaro's west coast premiere about two individuals' search and discovery of what it means to be a family.

Review excerpts from the
Los Angeles Times:

CRITIC'S CHOICE "A resident artist at the Mark Taper Forum, (playwright) Alfaro attempts a daring mixture of the intense and the intensely funny. And he succeeds. The sharply realized West Coast premiere of 'Straight as a Line' comes courtesy of the Playwrights' Arena,..

"Here's what it is: A series of odd, often painful scenes between a British expatriate, working as a casino change maker in Vegas, and her dying son. The roles are acted with gusto and grace by Emily Kuroda and James Sie...

"Director Jon Lawrence Rivera respects the material's wry off-centeredness. The staging risks overstatement in treating the brief transition scenes--each working variations on the line, "The doctor was here today"--as grotesque vaudeville. The actors pull them off, though..."

-- MICHAEL PHILLIPS, Los Angeles Times
November 23, 1999


Review excerpts from
Back Stage West

CRITIC'S PICK "In the West Coast premiere of Luis Alfaro's STRAIGHT AS A LINE, there are many moments which can only be called startling. Indeed, one of the most exciting things about this two-person play is the ways it works against our expectations...

The work is also extremely accessible to a contemporary audience...

STRAIGHT AS A LINE affirms above all the essence of theatre."

-- ADELINA ANTHONY, Back Stage West


Review excerpts from
EDGE Magazine

"What Alfaro knows, and employs powerfully, are the high stakes of both Vegas and AIDS --- the garishness, the dark humor, the irony, the fever, the universal pain and, yes, the theatricality.

STRAIGHT AS A LINE is a relationship play, a family play with something everyone will recognize as slap-in-your-face reality...

Ultimately it's director Jon Lawrence Rivera who unravels the play's heartstrings and pulls out the emotional stops.

Rivera has staged it with care and precision but not without flair; following Alfaro's lead, he knows how to work the Vegas and AIDS backdrop without sledgehammering it and the results stun.

"STRAIGHT AS A LINE is as good (and as gay) as it gets."

-- MICHAEL KEARNS, EDGE Magazine


Review excerpts from
Park La Brea News/Beverly Press

"This is an unbearably sad, surprisingly funny dissection of a far too short relationship that comes about only as a result of a failed suicide. Morbid as it might have been, Alfaro's language takes no solace from the easy cliche of recycled deathbed homileties, but seems to revel in new forms that give the lie to tried and true, seen it all, been there, done that. In the mouths of the amazing Kuroda and Sie, it becomes a new kind of poetry.

"Jon Lawrence Rivera has a lot to answer for as director of this extraordinary piece - for its physical charm and wit, for its terse, unsentimental clarity, for its brisk pacing and clean uncluttered transformations.

"A brilliant job by all."

--MADELEINE SHANER, Park La Brea News/Beverly Press

THE ALL SOULS TRILOGY
A trilogy of plays in repertory
By NICK SALAMONE

Directed by:

• JON LAWRENCE RIVERA (Part 1: ALL SOULS' DAY)
• NICK SALAMONE (Part 2: RIFFS & CREDOS)
  
• JESSICA KUBZANSKY (Part 3: WHALE WATCHERS)

GLAXA STUDIOS
3707 Sunset Boulevard in Silverlake (just east of Lucile)
APRIL / MAY 2000

"well worth seeing...the characterizations are achingly real."
-- LA TIMES

"a commendable undertaking...Salamone's grandiose, multidecade saga focuses on defining moments and events in the lives of a group of gay and lesbian friends."
-- LA WEEKLY

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