125 stories by "Philip Brandes"
"Time Stands Still" more than it should in an earnest but only intermittently engaging revival of Donald Margulies' 2009 drama at North Hollywood's Secret Rose Theatre.
When it comes to the heartbreaking silences between parents and children, Australian playwright Andrew Bovell observes that "having nothing to say is just another way of having so much to sa…
"Hard to believe, but totally true!" That's how Time, our mythical narrator, sums up the fanciful events in "Melissa Arctic," Craig Wright's modern-day transposition of "The Winter's Tale."
"Conviction" is the flip side of "Doubt" " in more than a semantic sense.
To likely audiences for "O'Neill's Ghosts," the late Jovanka Bach's biographically-based drama about playwright Eugene O'Neill, it shouldn't come as any great surprise that her subject had p…
Neil LaBute's "In a Dark Dark House" begs the immediate question: why bother with the redundant title? Any residence where Mr. LaBute comes knockin' is not likely to sit on the sunny side of…
The line of succession from Samuel Beckett to playwright Will Eno runs through the Irish actor Conor Lovett.
They whine, they can't share, they're pathologically needy … all the familiar complaints about child rearing surface in "Family Planning," but not in the way you might expect.
The grim aftershocks of South Africa's racist apartheid regime will be with us for some time to come, which makes the cautionary social relevance of Carole Eglash-Kosoff's docudrama "The Hum…
Trying to be a better person might seem an unlikely motivator for the protagonist in a Neil LaBute play. Nevertheless, it’s the fulcrum on which “Fat Pig” pivots in a Hudso…
Thanksgiving dinner can often be a recipe for disaster, but it proves especially problematic for the workaholic chef who finds her familiar familial dysfunction laced with far grimmer ingred…
It’s not every play that spawns a pop culture trope on the order of “Six Degrees of Separation.” Yet there’s far more to John Guare’s 1990 drama than platitudes…
“Every great artist has freed himself from something — his family, his nation, his race,” warns the worldly mentor to an aspiring painter in Chaim Potok’s semi-autobi…
Though Thomas Jefferson wasn’t the Founding Father renowned for chopping cherry trees, he cherry-picked Scripture with aplomb in producing his famous Jefferson Bible.
Steeped in star-crossed tragedy, mordant humor and paranormal activity — in other words, an Irish play to its core — Marina Carr’s contemporary take on the story of Medea, …
A convenience store cashier endures a stream of oddball customers, arguments about 1970s movies, even a drop-in by an ex-girlfriend now engaged to be married to someone else — the syno…
Very little about Shakespeare’s blood-soaked earliest tragedy lends itself to reimagining the play as an old-time variety show, and lacking the ingenuity to make the concept work Stell…
As if transforming philosophical debate into a high-stakes drama wasn't enough theatrical alchemy, Cormac McCarthy’s riveting two-hander, “The Sunset Limited,” at Ventura&r…
“How will I ever have a career if I don’t sound like everyone else?” doubts young tenor Roland Hayes at a supremely ironic point in “Breath and Imagination,” Da…
As a snapshot of Harlem in 1943, John Henry Redwood’s “The Old Settler” evokes some historical artifacts that have faded into obscurity — party line telephones, the S…
“A Short Stay at Carranor” feels like anything but.
As a spate of spontaneous serial psychosis grips Victorian-era London, a theatrical classic lit mash-up pits the deductive reasoning of the world’s most famous fictional detective agai…
Judas Iscariot: Worst friend ever or fall guy in a greater plan for the salvation of mankind? Stephen Adly Guirgis’ “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” explores differing per…
Anyone familiar with Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum -- the scenic Topanga Canyon outdoor theater operated by the late actor’s family -- will immediately appreciate the slyly ap…
Though Shakespeare’s Bottom claimed his dream was “past the wit of man” to describe, it’s well within the wit of the Troubadour Theater Company to revive in spectacul…
