Las Vegas Weekly

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Location, location, location: After six nomadic months without a dedicated headquarters, Insurgo Theater Movement has found a new home in the eclectic Commercial Center. Kitty-corner from The Rack fetishwear shop and the Green Door sex club, Insurgo’s new next-door neighbors include a tranny bar, a hair salon, a Chinese tailor and a wig shop.

Pretty much everything a theater company could wish for, right?

Especially a dependably unpredictable alt-theater troupe such as Insurgo, which is leasing the 70-seat, 3,000-square-foot, first-floor space, formerly a ballroom dance studio. Artistic Director John Beane was still laying carpet, painting corners and focusing lights right up to showtime; by fortunate coincidence, the first play, Jeremy Saulnier’s new dark comedy, Murder Party, which opens tonight, is set in an abandoned industrial warehouse, excusing any remaining rough edges.

“We tend to be pretty prolific, given the opportunity, and we try to take a fresh look at everything we touch,” says Beane, who has planned an ambitious 13-play repertory season for the 36-actor ensemble, including a typically atypical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Loves Labours Lost—staged as a battle of the bands between a debauched Euro rock group and an all-girl punk band—along with Chekhov’s The Seagull, Oscar Wilde’s Salome and Beane’s own directorial take on Othello, which opens January 8.