Jon Robin Baitz

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Mizlansky / Zilinsky -- starring Starring Nathan Lane and Paul Sand by Jon Robin Baitz, Jon Robin Baitz, Nathan Lane (Performer), Paul A. Sand (Performer), L.A. Theatre Works (Performer), Julie Kavner (Performer), Rob Morrow, Grant Shaud, Harry Shearer  

Hollywood producer Davis Mizlansky has it all - Italian shoes, a house in the hills, even an unctuous assistant who picks the scallions out of his Szechuan noodles. But he'll lose it all to the IRS - unless he can pull off one more deal.

Jon Robin Baitz has a wicket eye for detail and a natural talent for storytelling to brilliantly craft an hilarious portrait of modern-day Hollywood and its denizens. Directed by Ron West and produced by Susan Albert Loewenberg, Jon Robin Baitz' "Mizlansky/Zilinsky" is an amazing multicast, audio theatre performance. -- Midwest Book Review

Part of the series heard locally on KCRW, this production of L.A. Theatre Works, now in its 25th year, boasts the fevered hysterics of Nathan Lane as a producer reduced to avoiding the IRS and his ex-wife while dealing with a nefarious partner on a deal to produce substandard Bible stories for kids. A terrific cast, well directed by Ron West. -- Entertainment Today

The Substance of Fire : A Screenplay by Jon Robin Baitz

Many of the greatest American plays of the 20th century have examined dysfunctional families under pressure. Add the American obsession with business and you have the preoccupation of The Substance of Fire, an award-winning 1990 off-Broadway drama. In Jon Robin Baitz's screenplay, the conflict between a father and his three grown children for control of the family publishing business has only grown sharper. The patriarch, Isaac, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, would rather see the company founder while publishing worthy books, than to prosper publishing slick junk. His three grown children, on whom he has lavished, Lear-like, enough stock to control his little kingdom, want the company to become a thriving concern, and feel Dad's standards are absurdly rigid. The question is not so much who will win control of the company, but on what terms and whether any such battle ever truly has an emotional victory.

Works by Jon Robin Baitz

 Awards Jon Robin Baitz has received:

IndyView: Jon Robin Baitz, Playwright

By Bridget LeRoy

Excerpt:

...Baitz, the dramatist responsible for The Substance of Fire, The End of the Day, Three Hotels (originally produced at The Bay Street Theatre), and A Fair Country, has provided one of the most original voices on the New York stage in recent memory. A life lived in many different places (including a childhood spent in South Africa) gives Robbie an inner view of the American Abroad, living by another set of politics and social morality. Baitz's work isn't about the bland, "like relationships in the '90s, or anything like that," said Bay Street's co-artistic director Emma Walton. "Robbie writes about big, brave things..."

Jon Robin Baitz Confronts a Younger Self While Revamping an Early Work

By Naomi Pfefferman, Entertainment Editor

Excerpt:

Before Robbie Baitz was Jon Robin Baitz, the playwright, he was, in his words, "a smart-ass little spoiled Beverly Hills snot" who worked as a gofer for a couple of Hollywood con artists. Rather than sensibly going East to college, he had elected to remain in Los Angeles to glean some life experience, and so had fallen in with "a den of thieves," he says.

He took the gofer job out of "sheer necessity," he adds, as his parents were living abroad and he had been fired, after just five hours, from a previous job as a waiter. Thereafter, the gofer-slave spent endless days tooling around Los Angeles in his rusty orange VW Rabbit, searching for just the right brand of Genoa tuna or smoked Hunan peppers for his despotic but lovable bosses...

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