YOU SEE A poet out of time, an ancient soul yet our contemporary, has come to sing to us of quarrel. He comes shabby from the road, dusty and reluctant. It is a killing effort for th…
AND HE DOES In the 1980s, Barry McGovern and Gerry Dukes collaborated to cut three novels by Samuel Beckett (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) into a few monologues, divided by lighting cu…
First: it is a bad play. The first minute is bad and it gets worse. Its badness nearly reaches an apex when, during the inevitable hushed climax (which of course happens two feet from my fro…
UNFINISHED BUSINESS Son of Semele’s 4th annual Company Creation Festival presents new works by nascent Los Angeles troupes. The festival’s first offering, Bunk, is what you&#…
MY FAVORITE NIGHTS Looking back over a year’s playgoing, it’s every bit as easy to be jaded about little broke theaters as it is about big grant-eaters. Little broke theaters…
WINTER HIGH, WINTER LOW The Troubadour Theater Company opened a self-congratulatory love story Friday night, blowing a kiss to its own repertoire with its tenth annual holiday song-and-dance…
THE DEW ON THE GORSE In the 1960s, Beckett and Pinter started a vogue of shabby-old-man-reminiscing plays so influential that as late as 1995, Sebastian Barry went ahead and wrote one too.Â…
FROM THE DECK OF THE H.M.S. CYNIC Remember when George Lucas took the awesome, mystical enigma of The Force and shrank it to the antiseptic science of midi-chlorians, essentially just a kind…
OVER THE DARK HARBOR WATER Walking a cold, mostly deserted Santa Monica Pier on the way to this show, I passed a photographer’s booth blaring the Azealia Banks song about "cunt getting…
TO BE! (TRAPPED INSIDE YOUR OWN PRODUCTION) The explosion of solo performance pieces in the 1970s and 80s extended the creative lives of fine artists like Lily Tomlin and made stars of socia…
EXPERIMENT SANS CONTROL GROUP In 2012, Tokyo-based company Faifai decided to bring its 2009 movement-and-language assembly Anton, Neko, Kuri to international audiences. In a move she rev…
TWEE OF KNOWLEDGE New York downtowner Young Jean Lee’s 2011 rock concert-with-monologues We’re Gonna Die begins very well " at Wednesday’s Los Angeles premiere, a horrifyin…
WAITING FOR GODYSSEUS Consider the last four suitors of Odysseus’s grass widow, Queen Penelope of Ithaca. Clad in Speedos, the men have gathered their dwindling numbers for the las…
OF KNOTS AND TANGLES Johnna Adams’ 2012 play Gidion’s Knot, now receiving its premiere Los Angeles staging by the Furious Theatre Company, lends itself to spoilers. To know m…
IS THIS A KEGGER I SEE BEFORE ME? The morning after the Thane has killed his king, and one of those epic, omen-riddled Shakespearean storms has ravaged the countryside, Macbeth snaps out my …
BIG HOGS AND HOT POCKETS We buy products because they consume us. Ultimately our products replace us, because if you are what you eat, it follows that what you eat also is you. And a…
HEAVENLY SAINTS PRESERVE US Ten days after opening night, Luis Alfaro still wasn’t off-book for his one-man confessional work-in-progress. This matters because the moment when he l…
COUNT THIS SHEEP AND FALL ASLEEP As dull as its premise is exciting, Jaime Robledo’s production of Edward Einhorn’s 2010 play, adapted from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androi…
YON METHINKS SHE STANDS Over the last year or so, some of my best time in an audience has been spent watching Paige Lindsey White. Twice in collaboration with director Jessica Kubzansky …
THE KEY OF IMAGINATION Many an actor, writer, and director settle for professionalism. To get it up there and know your lines, to raise a question or resolve a story, to light the perfor…
IN PLAIN SIGHT Eddie Carbone (Vince Melocchi) is a good man whose frustration at not getting everything he deserves -Â in this case his adopted niece Catherine (Lisa Cirincione) – c…
SELFISHNESS AND SACRIFICE Alcestis is the old Greek story of a man who allows his wife to sacrifice her life for his. As interpreted by Euripides, T.S. Eliot and others, it has much to s…
YES, EVERYONE Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister were BBC television shows that ran on American PBS stations when I was a kid; I resented them for not being Monty Python, and dismissed th…
ME NO LIKE Brandon Baruch’s new play answers the question, What if a tedious dipshit got cloned? Failed actor and drunken doofus Tuck (Benjamin Durham) sponges off his girlfriend G…
ABNORMALLY REAL When you avoid musicals as strenuously as I do, after a while you wonder why. For some time I decided that it was the generally trite treatment of serious issues, a gripe…