Los Angeles Premiere

A contemporary adaptation of Moliere's stylish comedy-- rhymed couplets, young lovers and old fools! A boisterous farce about women seeking enlightenment in such excess that they become more out of touch than when they were when ignorant. Join us at NOTE while we search for a little "California Consciousness"--Molière style!

"Larry Biederman attacks with relentless exuberance Molière’s satire of women shutting their eyes to the duplicity of a con artist, while trying to open their 'minds.'... Lovely performances." - LA Weekly

'It all looks great--a kind of paean to pop culture enlightenment slapped together with the pageantry of a particularly whacked-out Laugh In episode. And as usual at NOTE, the actors don't hold back.' - BSW

An Existential Rock & Roll Comedy

"Finer noble gases" are gases that do not readily attach to other elements to form a compound... much like the inert occupants of the play's East Village apartment. Once a vibrant rock & roll band, now gone to seed... will they and their shy, secretive neighbor be roused from their isolation and inactivity by the catalyzing force of a roller-skating little girl?

"Sweet, melancholy... Director Aaron Francis works magic with a solid ensemble!" -L.A. Weekly (Recommended!)

"Breath-catchingly tender." -BackStage West

Blue Surge is one of a string of critical hit plays written by one of America's most prominent women playwrights, Rebecca Gilman. It tells the story of Curt, a small-town Midwestern cop, and Sandy, the 18-year-old prostitute he meets in a raid on a massage parlor. Curt finds an unlikely kindred spirit in Sandy and begins a relationship with her that puts everything he's worked for - his career, his friendships, and his engagement to his fiancee - at risk. But Curt sees a future with Sandy, an escape from his difficult past. As the two of them chase the American Dream, they must learn a skill that is foreign to them both: they must learn to hope.

A good old-fashioned love story with a few surprising and outrageous twists: a married couple whose relationship is in jeopardy because of the wife's conversion to Buddhism; a lesbian couple whose obstacle to getting married isn't so much George Bush as their own arguments and heated debates over everything nuptial; and a promiscuous and commitment-phobic gay man who finally falls in love with the (questionably) ideal mate: A Shark!

In this LA premiere of Kirk Wood Bromley's tragicomedy in modern verse and explosive prose, Griffin Hunter, newly appointed U.N. Undersecretary for Disarmament, arrives in San Francisco for a conference and quickly becomes entangled in the machinations of international moguls, diplomats, lovers and thugs -- most of whom want to destroy his career, his marriage, and his vision for a better world.

In the Los Angeles premiere of this Obie Award-winning comedy, three neighbors fail to connect through misunderstandings and self-obsession. (Imagine Friends or Seinfeld as written by Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett.) The New York Times called it "The most alluring new play to open in New York this season."

Sarah Kane was born in Essex on February 3, 1971, the daughter of parents who were journalists and deeply religious. She studied drama at Bristol University, graduating with first class honors, and then did an MA at Birmingham University. Kane’s short career began in 1995 with the anti-war “Blasted” provoking critical outrage and playwrights Edward Bond and Harold Pinter eloquently coming to her defense. Kane struggled regularly with serious bouts of depression and when a failed suicide attempt landed her in the hospital in February 1999, she killed herself a couple of days later while being treated.

From Aleks Sierz’s www.inyerface-theatre.com website:
“[Kane] did more than any other writer to change the face of British playwriting… In came confrontational drama, aggressively in-yer-face and vividly depicting scenes of shock and terror. Yet despite the sensational tactics, what makes these plays great is their genuine emotional punch.
When I asked Kane what she thought of the label 'in-yer-face theatre', she shrugged. “At least it's f*cking better than ‘New Brutalism,’” she said. Although the trend started in the early 1990s, it only took off when Kane's "Blasted" was staged at the tiny Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in January 1995.
Denounced by the Daily Mail as 'This disgusting feast of filth' and derided by the Guardian as 'scenes of masturbation, fellatio, frottage, micturition, defecation…homosexual rape, eye gouging and cannibalism', “Blasted” sold out…Experimental in structure and provocative in its portrayal of civil war, the play was [discomforting] because it made audiences feel they were experiencing the emotions shown on stage.”