COMFORT CANCER Steven Dierkes has written the play one thinks of writing after a friend gets a brain tumor. Like a character in Land Line, I once was a guy who talked long-distance day a…
IMPORTANCE AND FRIVOLITY Radically altering the circumstances of a revered text is the prerogative of any new production. It’s one of the methods theater reserves to drag fusty old…
LOST Lost Moon Radio’s new Hollywood Fringe Festival show is by far the least impressive Lost Moon outing I’ve seen. A departure from their usual late-night free-form radio s…
THE RISE AND FALL OF A TRANSFERRED PRODUCTION When it was originally presented at Sacred Fools, Vanessa Claire Stewart’s play had a subtitle (The Rise and Fall and Rise of Buster Keato…
BRIGHT LIGHTS ON A DIM HORIZON Two hit men wait in a shitty Vegas motel for the boss to give them a goddamn call. One of ‘em (Leon Russom) is an all-business, no-shit guy on the ve…
Message on a scrap of linen found inside a cigar tin purchased in Bucharest, 2003: For seven years in the vigor of my youth I had made a living as a stuntman and rigger in Los Angeles. When …
DEARTH OF DRAMA Steven Drukman’s Death of the Author takes its name, premise, and some of the devices in its dialogue from a Roland Barthes essay on postmodernism. It’s wonde…
THEATRICAL ANTHRAX In Ellen McLaughlin’s 2011 play Ajax in Iraq, a heroic American soldier, A.J., is raped by her sergeant. Her Iraq War story parallels that of the Trojan War hero…
Opening night, in the alley behind the theater, the light over the stage door burnt out. The overcast had been thick all day and at 7:00 it might have been midnight, so the lead actor missed…
I LOVES YOU, STORY I grew up with Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald and Janis Joplin and Billie Holiday singing "Summertime" outside a context of which I was ignorant; I never cared much for…
RURALITY AS A METAPHORICAL STRATEGY IN CHEKHOV: CHECK Deconstructing two Anton Chekhov short stories with a series of post-hip Director’s Theater flourishes, Paul Lazar and Annie-B Par…
ON A SEA OF TEARS It’s a play that deals with AIDS, and the central character is a little boy. Okay? So while Coeurage Theatre Company (like many who have produced David Saar&#…
TITTY GARAGE Shows that are listed at two hours and fifteen minutes shouldn't be forgiven for running three hours, unless they are written by a genius like Mikhail Bulgakov. One of that …
THREADBARE In the 1950s, dissident South African Can Themba wrote a short story called "The Suit," describing a cuckold’s response to his wife’s infidelity " specifically his ins…
WELL MET BY MOONLIGHT Some plays are just too good to be easily staged. In my experience Shakespeare’s most beloved comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, has defied more directo…
SHAKESPEARE WISHES HE WERE THIS FUNNY Mistaken identities, cross-dressing, puns, fart jokes and dick jokes and pussy jokes. You know where you can find these? Movies starring Saturda…
I fell off the wagon sometime last month. I’m not sure what day it is, to tell you the truth. I hadn’t had a drink in something like ten years; maybe eleven. I should have kept g…
PROMETHEUS BOUND In a production as stately and reverent as its subject was startling and rebellious, Philip Hayes Dean has directed his own one-man-with-musical-accompanist play to a stands…
NOT EVEN GOD Hugh Whitemore’s 2001 play God Only Knows breaks some of the most basic rules of dramaturgy: a gun is introduced which does not go off; an argument is begun which is not f…
Social justice warriors, take heed! Right now, you’re full of fix-the-world and stop-the-madness. Packed with outrage and frustration. Shit’s not right! Everybody’s not equ…
STILLED LIFE In 2007, Noel Coward and David Lean’s 1945 film Brief Encounter, a somewhat maudlin expansion of the 1936 Coward one-act Still Life, was turned into a stage spectacle by C…
A HAPPY FEW, A HAPPY MANY Just about every Shakespeare production runs the risk of getting a packed house of high school students at least one performance in the run. This situation is a…
RICH AND BEAUTIFUL I like a play that vacuums the audience in the wake of its rocket so that we tumble after, happy travelers grateful for the bruises. We bounce and roll along, too ecst…
If you haven’t seen the Wilshire Boulevard Temple since its retrofitting and refurbishing, do. Originally decorated in 1929 through the generosity of MGM boy wonder Irving Thalberg, th…
A TRIP Your average 4 to 12 year old carries enough infectious optimism and joie de vivre to put even a theater critic in a good mood. But childless people who like children notice thing…