Paul Birchall – Stage Raw A ghost story around the campfire on the beach: It seems like such a natural fit, you almost wonder why you haven’t seen this sort of thing before. But director Kate Jopson’s compelling site specific production of Kristin Idaszak’s moody drama, set a few yards from the thundering surf at twilight … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw Love, muses Richard Cabral during the opening moments of his autobiographical solo show, means different things to different people, and can even be something different for any one person at different stages in his or her life. Cabral’s perception of love as a young boy, he tells his audience, differed … Read more
Terry Morgan – Stage Raw Schrödinger’s cat has been in the local theatrical zeitgeist of late. It was used to symbolize the interlocked statuses of life and death in Dirt (which just closed at the Raven Playhouse) and is even more central in Aaron Hendry’s The Superhero and His Charming Wife, a production by the Not Man Apart theater … Read more
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw Gary (playwright Terry Ray) and Brad (Kevin Scott Allen) are sort of a gay odd couple. Gary is a 28-year-old gay virgin, nerdy and prim, who thinks his homosexuality is a deep dark secret, though everyone at his school refers to him as gay Gary. Read more… Les Spindle – Frontiers … Read more
Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze “Anybody can take their clothes off. But to do it on a stage, with thousands and thousands of people looking at you? That takes something.” Read more… Now running through May 8.
Pauline Adamek – Stage Raw An astonishingly edgy, timely and sensitive drama by Aliza Goldsmith, A Singular They is making its world premiere at the Blank Theatre — and what a singular play it is. Read more… Now running through May 1.
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw Immigration issues are bandied about in political discourse in the media every day, but the lives of kitchen workers and janitors and fruit pickers are rarely brought to the stage. Kudos to New York-based playwright Elizabeth Irwin for doing just that. Read more… Margaret Gray – LA Times The workplace, where … Read more
Paul Birchall – Stage Raw Playwright Charles A. Duncombe’s drama is ostensibly a riff on the play Othello. It’s not an adaptation, mind you, because the structure and plot digress wildly from the Shakespearean original — but it is a work involving some of the same themes with basically the same set of characters. Read more… Now running … Read more
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly Phrazzled, by writer/director Phinneas Kiyomura, is a smart character-driven satire that takes aim at the underside of television production. Yes, the terrain is familiar, with the usual suspects — falsehood, greed, betrayal — driving the plot. But Kiyomura, a long time local theater artist who’s also written for television, ventures … Read more
Jenny Lower – LA Weekly More than any contemporary playwright who comes to mind, Sarah Ruhl’s characters inhabit worlds wholly her own. Even when she adopts a historical setting, as with In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), her lyrical sensibility fashions heightened realities, where a house of string or a dead man’s perpetually ringing … Read more