Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw
In its world premiere, Cory Hinkle’s The End of Beauty runs about two hours, but it’s not until the last 10 minutes that it grips one’s attention. That’s when Silas Weir Mitchell, playing one of the story’s three characters, looks back on the past with acceptance, perplexity and regret.
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Now running through June 18
Darrett Sanders
Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen
“We are the Wolves. We are the Wolves,” a group of teenage girls chants, each repetition of the phrase growing in both volume and urgency. The Wolves are a high school indoor soccer team, and the subject of Sarah DeLappe’s play of the same name currently in its west coast premiere at the Echo Theater Company. Read more…
Katie Buenneke – Stage Raw
It’s both remarkable and unnerving when a writer, director, and cast work in tandem so effectively that you leave the theater feeling like you know the characters personally. It’s a rare magic, currently happening in Atwater Village, where Echo Theater Company is staging Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves. Read more…
Now running through April 22
Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen
In How We’re Different From Animals, a world premiere play based on short stories by Miranda July, there is one common theme—romance. Romance is, after all, how July argues we are different from animals.
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Now running through March 24
Mae Koo Photography
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw
Although Bliss (Or Emily Post is Dead!), is set in North Orange, New Jersey in the 1960s, a rudimentary knowledge of Greek mythology is helpful in fathoming the themes of Jami Brandli’s ambitious but muddled satire, directed by Darin Anthony.
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Now running through December 2
Darrett Sanders
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw
Although the publishing world serves as the framework for Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ scathing dramedy, his story is less about the decimation of a once flourishing profession as it is about the impoverishment of our lives and our relationships with others, or lack thereof.
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Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen
When Gloria, a Pulitzer Prize-finalist play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins currently in its west coast premiere at The Echo Theater Company, begins, it seems like a modern workplace comedy.
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Now running through October 21
Darrett Sanders
Terry Morgan - Stage Raw
Not every work of art is designed with the mass audience in mind. Some are experiments or explorations, or maybe just a diverting goof. All these terms might apply to John O’Keefe’s All Night Long, a kaleidoscopic fever dream of a play that revels in erudition and silly humor but doesn’t hew to a traditional dramatic structure or feature a standard resolution.
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Now running through October 7
(Photo by Darrett Sanders)
Terry Morgan - Stage Raw
If one were to attempt to find a work comparable to Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, it would likely be Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Both plays deal with the mundane and the sacred, and both delve into the complexities of small communities.
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Now running through August 25
Darrett Sanders
Terry Morgan - Stage Raw
Caring for an infant is an important part of life, yet its difficulties are rarely depicted in the arts. While there is no lack of stories about pregnancy and birth, once the child is born, the drama seems to be considered less interesting. Playwright Molly Smith Metzler begs to differ…….Read more…
Frances Baum Nicholson –The Stage Struck Review
There is nothing quite so visceral, quite so individualistic in response, or quite so romanticized as becoming a new mother. Read more…
Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen
What exactly does it mean to be the “perfect mother?” This is a question many non-mothers think they know the answer to that also haunts new mothers, terrified of making the wrong decision in terms of what is best for their child.
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Now running through August 19
Photo courtesy of Playwrights’ Arena)
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw
It’s Los Angeles in 1939. Count Basie and his band are scheduled to play at the Palomar Ballroom — one of the first African-American groups to perform there. Next door, at Bimini Baths, two employees, African-American Amen (Noel Arthur) and Mexican-American Zenobio (Adrian Gonzalez) have been given the onerous job of cleaning up the tar-covered body of a drunken white man…….Read more…
Now running through
Kathy Flynn
Terry Morgan – Stage Raw
Steve Apostolina’s Forever Bound is an uncommon play that begins in one genre and ends in another. It’s always difficult to market something that doesn’t fit neatly into one category, so writers are often encouraged not to create anything like that. However, the results of such experiments are usually intriguing artistically. Such is the case with Forever Bound…. Read more…
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly
Steve Apostolina’s dark and thoughtful dramedy, Forever Bound, starts out as two disparate narratives that come together in an intense, disquieting way. Commencing as a wry comedy about a nebbish whose life is on the downturn, it culminates as a riveting face-off between good and evil, and highlights just how hard it can be to sever the formidable bonds that bind us to our past.
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Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen
If you watched only the opening scenes of Forever Bound, a play written by Steve Apostolina now in its world premiere at the Atwater Village Theatre in Los Angeles, you would likely never guess the turns the story eventually takes. Read more…
Now running through June 16
Darrett Sanders
Ellen Dostal – Broadway World
The air between the words is so thick you could cut it with a knife in Daniel Talbott‘s shadowy play about three siblings attempting to survive their dysfunctional family. Each is broken in his or her own way and, as the hairball unravels, the audience must piece together their fragmented story over a period of six years.
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Terry Morgan - Stage Raw
There are generally two types of ghost stories: those with haunted characters, and those in which it is the audience that becomes haunted — that is, where the tale lingers after the show like an unquiet memory.
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Harker Jones – Arts In LA
Daniel Talbott’s What Happened When is a claustrophobic, intense, and harrowing familial drama in the guise of a horror story. Set in a bedroom with red-paint (or blood-) spattered walls, three siblings huddle on a bed in an old farmhouse.
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Now running through April 26
Peter Carrier
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw
In the interests of full disclosure, let me say that I am not very knowledgeable about computers and programming, so much of the technical jargon and inside humor in Marek Glinski’s play went right over my head. Glinski’s play might be called a cyber-satire, or a madcap comedy for the cyber age. I could not always follow exactly what was happening, though the overall idea was clear enough.
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Now running through April 15