What the Critics Have Said

"In the end, let's be grateful that the 14-year-old City Garage, under its restless director Frédérique Michel, persists, flirting with danger to bring us experimental and avant garde plays that no one else will touch."
-- Edmund Newton, New Times Los Angeles

"The company at City Garage devotes itself to producing neglected plays, often European classics with an expressionistic bent. Unconcerned with current trends or commercial appeal, City Garage is blessedly devoid of the showcase mentality that permeates so many of Los Angeles's smaller theaters -- a determinedly pure artistic pursuit."
-- F. Kathleen Foley, Los Angeles Times

"City Garage is situated in an alley adjoining Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade -- that mecca of consumerism around which the other legit stages in the immediate area devote themselves to sketch comedy and other comparatively feel-good entertainments. But ... City Garage, in its little cabin behind Fourth Street, has for the last decade been slogging away at cryptic, newish European writing. This is a theater that ... has devotedly put on plays by Ginka Steinwachs, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Michel Tournier and now Heiner Müller -- heady, abstract works by playwrights from France, Poland and Germany whose writings, if not for City Garage, would remain unknown to most Angelenos, plays that nobody else in the region has had the savvy, or the gall, to touch."
-- Stephen Leigh Morris, LA Weekly

"I am constantly and consistently amazed by the work done by City Garage."
-- Anne Louise Bannon, Back Stage West

"The play is a wild kaleidoscope of sex, politics and art, sprinkled with allusions to the 20th century ... the barrage of visuals and wordplay is so forceful that this production should be seen more than once to be fully appreciated."
-- Miriam Jacobson, LA Weekly

"Director Frédérique Michel and her longtime associate Charles A. Duncombe scale exhilarating heights ... A collaborative triumph!"
CRITIC'S CHOICE, Los Angeles Times

"An incendiary patchwork quilt of ideas, information and dramatic outrageousness ... This is an adventuresome, at times, confrontational work not to be ignored."
-- Brad Schreiber, Backstage West

"Director Frédérique Michel brilliantly balances the explosively comic and movingly melancholic in a precise, stylish staging that segues from drill-team choreography, to dead-on spot-lit monologues ... The ensemble is impressive."
-- Constance Monaghan, LA Weekly

"Part recitation, part performance, this esoteric pastiche is framed with the company's usual stylistic flair, juxtaposing heady conceptual dialogue with erotic imagery... Augmented with Charles A. Duncombe Jr.'s customary evocative production design, this "Project" represents solid work from the company applied to material that doesn't easily lend itself to the stage."
-- Philip Brandes, LA Times

"They inhabit the tiny stage of stage of Santa Monica's City Garage Theatre in a nearly pitch-perfect production directed by Frédérique Michel."
-- Laura Hitchcock, Curtain Up LA

"That we never fully or satisfactorily fathom what makes these men (and others like them) tick is understandable; that we find judging them difficult is what makes the play thought-provoking."
-- Lovell Estell III, LA Weekly

"Beckett-like lyricism ... Flashes of visual beauty and linguistic playfulness..."
Recommended, LA Weekly

"Superb cast and expert direction ... mesmerizing!"
CRITIC'S CHOICE, Los Angeles Times