By John Farrell
Some plays are meant for smaller theaters. Beyond Therapy, which opened last week at Little Fish Theatre in San Pedro, is one of them.
When Beyond Therapy appeared on Broadway in 1981, it didn’t last three weeks. But in the 30 odd years since then, it has been performed all over the United States in small theaters and amateur productions. It has been called playwright Christopher Durang’s masterpiece. With a brilliantly selected cast and a simple one-set production (one of the play’s characters notes how her shrink’s office looks just like the restaurant she was recently at) you’ll wonder what Broadway missed. It was probably the plays hidden innocence.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the 2012 presidential and congressional will be the most expensive on record. The Center predicts, based on data from 18 months of fundraising and spending, that the elections will cost $5.8 billion, an increase of 7 percent from the 2008 cost of $5.4 billion. A significant chunk of that money will be coming from outside groups, the transparency of which are as murky as swamp water.
