QUITE A VIEUX Tennessee Williams deserves the credit he gets for a few outstanding texts, but for my money much of his oeuvre has been falsely enriched, and the late, long Vieux Carré (1977…
TOWARD A SAFE THEATER In 2015 Bathsheba Doran’s The Mystery of Love & Sex opened to mixed notices Off Broadway, which seems to be the exact pipeline for shows to get produced at…
CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE STAGE Every time I see Leon Russom I wish I had his body. Lean like a dancer, he uses the solidity of his shoulders, the slimness of his hips to create character and emp…
SHOWS THAT TELL, SHOWS THAT SHOW A list of the most popular investigative themes for artistic works in 2015 would certainly include (1) art itself, particularly within the same medium, and (…
I DID, TEN MINUTES IN Ike Holter's play Hit the Wall, a historical "remix" about June 27 and 28, 1969 in New York City, went up first at the Steppenwolf in Chicago in 2012. The next year it …
A HOMECOMING In last season's Failure: A Love Story, Joseph V. Calarco played a veterinarian who at one point had to euthanize his good friend, a dog played by Gregory Nabours. The staged mo…
CRITIC COVETS HEART It is unfair but true that in watching 24th Street Theatre’s American premiere production of Finegan Kruckmeyer’s Man Covets Bird, one automatically compares …
INHOSPITALITY IN A HOSPITAL A few weeks ago I spent a couple of nights at a hospital waiting for someone to be born. A couple of weeks later I spent a few more nights at the hospital, includ…
SOMETHING UNSATISFYINGLY APOCRYPHAL There are a few things that might not be entirely true about the Blank’s "World Premiere" of Jeff Tabnick’s Something Truly Monstrous, which o…
WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME …I would Love you ten years before the flood; And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews " Andrew Marvell It’s a measure of progr…
LOS PECES VIOLENTOS There is a dark parable in the bible, in Luke or maybe John; it’s in the Scheherazade " the tale of the thousandth night, perhaps. Your translation didn’t hav…
ME NEXT TIME I’m running up Pico. It’s 7:54 p.m. and I just parked on Rimpau because I’ve only lived in L.A. for 18 years and Google Maps told me Theatre Theater was .1 mil…
"DON’T LOOK AT ME" Jillian Leigh’s second play, Hooked, is extremely ambitious and fairly successful in the hands of director Terri Treas, producer Michael Zand, and a strong cas…
RAVE ON Almost a month ago, I went to Rogue Machine’s storytelling night for the first time. You know storytelling nights " they’re like poetry slams, only whiter and less politi…
RECREATION My editor and I didn’t toss a coin to see who would write the review " he’s smarter than that; he wrote a very nice preview piece, the kind I find very difficult, and …
DISILLUSION ON DEMAND In Rob Mersola’s Luka’s Room, Nick Marini plays a blithe, typical, technology-addicted college sophomore who has a rough summer after his father stops payin…
REAL THING I hate it when people talk about the need to "support" a good cause. Guilt is simply bad salesmanship. It kills it for me. It killed Save-the-Whales, and it sure didn’t work…
SUCCESS You have had at least one dream in which the universe of potential joy is realized in a moment. The moment is ethereal and tangible, in the way of dreams. For me this dream is always…
SYNTHETICS AND STRUCTURE Excelling at stage picture, Jaime Robledo sets a lot of toys in motion in Sacred Fools’ latest offering, recently extended into August. Robledo’s dire…
RHYMES WITH SIEVE In her play Shiv, the third part of an immigrant-experience trilogy first workshopped in 2013, Aditi Brennan Kapil writes of a character (played by Monika Jolly) named afte…
THE AMERICANS Tracy Letts wrote a bleak comedy in 2007 that sold a lot of tickets, won a bunch of prizes and ensured his writing career at least a footnote in the big books. August: Osage Co…
THESE, OUR PLAYWRIGHTS Kinky Neon Rocker is one of those rally-round-the-flag excuses theater people use to put on shows: A beautiful old curved-wood rocking chair, painted in day-glo motley…
HITCHES IN EXECUTION In his latest one-hour act, Simon Coronel divides the world into three categories: people who want to know how a magic trick is done, people who don’t want to know…
HAROLD THE CONQUERING HERO Harold Pinter wasn’t an Ivory Tower practitioner who won a Nobel for writing twenty-nine shocking plays about morality and five or six books of rather precio…
THE UNEXPECTED CUE Yasmina Reza is the most internationally popular playwright France has produced in a long time; certainly since Jean Genet, possibly since Molière. Her 1994 play Art, in …