RULIER THAN THOU I came to this show in a bad mood and left in a better one, which is as much praise as I can heap on a one-woman show about identity issues. There’s no theatrical faun…
THEATER OF WHAT THE FUCK As an impresario and creative force, the man who calls himself Zombie Joe is the envy of the North Hollywood arts scene. Largely on the remarkable popularity of Urba…
THE CRAGS OF DELIVERANCE If bad reviews are the flattest line my pen can draw, a steppe of the imagination that writes its unsurprising self, a good review is the Caucasus. To critique Impro…
LUMBER Workshopped once onstage in 2000, Stephen Fechter’s The Woodsman had its play form set aside while Fechter and director Nicole Kassell turned it into a screenplay that won the 2…
I went to a show last night at a theater that has been going out of business for years. A long time ago I acted there; my writing was performed there. I’ve seen many shows there, good …
Seen this yet? Of course you have. That’s the Black Guy Killed by a Cop video for last week. He wasn’t the only one, but Walter Scott got the attention. A couple days later, out …
Bitter Lemons learned early this morning that Actors’ Equity Association President Nick Wyman and Executive Director Mary McColl have jointly received a coveted honor from inter…
Blogger Isaac Butler has publicly called for Bitter Lemons to retract or revise what he calls a “factual error” in an article by Kevin Delin. What our editor Colin Mitchell…
If the Waiver War hinged on this debate, Equity lost yesterday. If I were an AEA member in any American city, I would listen to this episode of Warren Olney’s excellent Which …
I came to L.A. in the late 90s with the primary intention of not doing any more low-rent theater. Back in New York, I’d been the worst director and second-worst actor on Delancey Stree…
SHOW BIZ KIDS Cineastas at least doubles the self-reflexion of your average REDCAT show. In this new Argentinian play, written and directed by Mariano Penzotti, you watch no fewer than four …
These Re-Imagine LA Theatre guys are some of the bravest people in town. I mean it. Stupid is not what they are; foolhardy, yes. Which is a kind of brave. I mean, they did it. In the face of…
A RIDE YOU WON’T FIND IN ANAHEIM Any neighborhood with the elevated name of Silver Lake should have freshwater dolphins and interesting old hotels and a disfigured serial killer who st…
UP THE RABBIT HOLE There’s been a good deal of speculation over the last hundred-and-something years regarding the sexuality of Charles Dodgson, an Oxford professor of mathematics more…
My imperfect grasp of David Hume’s philosophy excites me on the concept of utility, which determines the value of an idea by asking how useful it is to society. Applying th…
SAILING THROUGH FOG The title of Eugene O’Neill’s 1921 drama Anna Christie is the nom de guerre chosen by a hard-knock 18-year-old who decides that if she’s going to get pa…
For years we ran our kitchen on the beach, where the desert road dies at the coast highway. Characters would hitchhike west out of plays and movies set at lonesome cafes in Arizona or …
A YEAR OF ECSTATIC MOMENTS Last year, as ever, I missed what I am told was some of the best theater that went up in Southern California. I don’t know what’s Best or Most. I saw s…
You bought the ticket, or you had had your friend who was in the show leave tickets for you at the booth. The girl in the booth was perhaps too old and certainly too responsible to be called…
BIRD THOU SURE AIN’T NOW Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. - P.B. Shelle…
One day last week, Colin Mitchell and I texted plans to meet at the Mark Taper Forum. We hadn’t seen each other in months. Twenty minutes after the text, with all of Los Angeles to att…
WHAT DIDN’T HE Joe Orton was a loudly subversive English playwright who, before his murder in 1967, helped rip out the loud, inefficient plumbing of kitchen sink social drama and repla…
THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS Shotspeare is a comedy punch mulled from liquor, a few conservatory-trained actors and Ringling Brothers clowns, and the brutalization of one of the best plays ever…
MORE SINNED AGAINST At one point in act four, the disillusioned and blinded Gloucester refuses help along the road: "I have no way and therefore want no eyes." It’s a line that Bill Bu…
WHAT INDEED The title of MarÃa Irene Fornés’ 1989 quartet of one-acts recalls a two-verse Old Testament passage in Isaiah. The wandering Jews cry out from the midst of war, famine,…