In 2014 the Geffen Playhouse decided to produce Harold Pinter’s first great play The Birthday Party. They assembled a star studded cast and an Oscar winning director. Ticket sales were through the roof. Expectation for the production was high.
What ended up happening is unbelievable, outrageous – and totally true. You may think you know the whole story…but you don’t. Hear all the backstage secrets from an actor who was part of that cast – and a witness to the entire theatrical disaster.
When his husband dies, Remy Washington, a Black man, finds himself both the owner of a drive-in movie theater and a caregiver to his late husband’s straight, white teenage son, Pup. United by their love of classic American monster movies, the two have developed a warm and caring familial chemistry – but their relationship fractures when Remy discovers Pup and his friends have been bullying a gay teen at his school. Told through dueting monologues and playful dialogue, Monsters of the American Cinema is a haunting and humorous tale about fathers and sons, ghosts and monsters.
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Inspired by Nicolai Gogol’s famous short story, Wolf Mankowitz’s The Bespoke Overcoat is by turns a deeply comic and unforgettably poignant reimagining of Gogol’s most famous classic tale, The Overcoat. Reset by Mankowitz into the Jewish East End of London, this story about an old clerk who can’t afford a new overcoat is a tale of love and resilience told with dignity and humor. Immediately hailed as one of Britain’s most exciting young playwrights when the play opened in London in 1953, Mankowitz adapted it into a film that won the Oscar at the 29th Academy Awards for Best Short Subject Film in 1957. The son of a Jewish bookseller in London’s East End, Mankowitz was a prolific dramatist, novelist, and screenwriter often know for depicting acts of humanity in a flawed but facinating world.
Siblings Bo and Ally are back in their childhood home in Idaho for the funeral of their father. Their mother Carol has painted the whole house white and is suspected to have been drinking since their father’s death. What Ally and Bo come to find out is that their mother has a method to her madness as she pulls out some home videos of their father just before he died. Called a fusion between realism and the absurd, A Permanent Image is a tense exploration of the distance families put between themselves, and what it takes to bring them back together.
H*tler’s Tasters is a dark comedy about the young German women who had the “honor” of being chosen as Adolf Hitler’s food tasters. Based on true events in history, with shades of 2024, H*tler’s Tasters explores the way girls navigate sexuality, patriotism and poison against the backdrop of war.
H*tler’s Tasters was inspired by a 2014 interview with 94-year-old Margot Wölk who, for the first time, revealed her harrowing past as one of Adolf Hitler’s food tasters. Margot, a German secretary at the time, was among fifteen young women selected for this “honor” at Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair.
