Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen
“Fifteen years ago I killed my sister.” This shocking line opens Nocturne by Adam Rapp, an acclaimed play that first debuted in New York in 2001.
Now running through August 13
Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen
“Fifteen years ago I killed my sister.” This shocking line opens Nocturne by Adam Rapp, an acclaimed play that first debuted in New York in 2001.
Now running through August 13
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw
This show is advertised as a one-woman show, but in this case the woman is a guy: Jimmy Fowlie (Go-Go Boy Interrupted), who modestly lists himself in the program as “Co-writer/Star.” The piece purports to be the one-woman show performed by Mia Dolan, the heroine of the movie Lala Land. (I haven’t seen the movie so some of the finer points of this piece may have been lost on me.)
Read more…
Now running through August 19
Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze
How can people be rhinoceroses? Ask that in the literal and figurative senses and you have Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 landmark play, “Rhinoceros.” Read more…
Lovell Estell III — Stage Raw
It’s difficult to imagine a timelier and more fitting play for the “Make America Great Again,” era than Eugène Ionesco’s 1959 absurdist satire. The playwright wrote it in response to the alarming ascent of fascism during the first half of the twentieth century. Despite the passage of time, it is arguably more relevant now than when it was first written. Read more…
Now running through
Frances Baum Nicholson – The Daily Breeze
Perhaps the two greatest dangers in producing an original work of theater is either directing your own performance or directing your own play. In either case, the absolutely necessary second opinion — the critique needed to make sure the thing is the best it can be — is lacking. Read more…
Paul Birchall – Stage Raw
My favorite episodes of Doctor Who, that amazing TV series about a time traveling alien that’s run for about 40 years, are the ones in which the Doctor meets earlier versions of himself. When the older character meets the younger character, there are always jokes about how the younger version hates how he turned out — while the older version always criticizes the younger version’s taste or intelligence or what have you. Read more…
Now running through August 27
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw
Premiering at the Skylight Theatre under Eric Hoff’s direction, Tom Jacobson’s latest play is a delectable little fable about free will, human folly and the encounter of a non-believer with God, Hell and the Devil.
Read more…
Rob Stevens – Haines His Way
With his latest work, The Devil’s Wife, playwright Tom Jacobson has created a fun piece of fluff. Read more…
Now running through August 20
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw
Anna (Marie Fahlgren) is a dancer and choreographer who not only walks in her sleep — she also dances. She has fled from her former lover, who seems to be stalking her, to strike out on her own. Read more…
Now running through July 30
Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze
What happens in other people’s homes behind closed doors? That’s the stuff of so much Great American Theater. Read more…
Now running through October 1
Lovell Estell III — Stage Raw
Continuing its successful run at the 2017 Hollywood Fringe Festival, Keith Huff’s dark two-character play is centered on the long time, combustible relationship between a pair of Windy City cops, whose professional and personal lives are thrown into freefall by circumstance and tragedy. Read more…
Now running through July 30
Margaret Gray – LA Times
Every summer I’m surprised by how much I enjoy the Independent Shakespeare Co.’s Griffith Park Free Shakespeare Festival. Performances start at 7 p.m., when the sun is still a bit too bright and the actors are oddly dressed figures in the distance, shouting British things I can’t quite hear over the crinkling of potato chip bags in the crowd. Read more…
Now running through July 22
Katie Buenneke – Stage Raw
Fans of the fourth wall — that imaginary wall separating performers from their audience — should steer clear of Lauren Yee’s new play King of the Yees, now playing at the Kirk Douglas in Culver City. But for more adventurous folks, those willing to throw caution (and conventional theatrical tradition) to the wind, the show proves a fun ride, full of twists and turns. Read more…
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly
The many pleasures of King of the Yees, directed by Joshua Kahan Brody at the Mark Taper Forum, emerge not from playwright Lauren Yee’s rambling unfocused script but from the abundant talents of its versatile ensemble and the production’s colorful staging. Read more…
Jonas Schwartz - TheaterMania
There are intriguing themes considered in Lauren Yee’s comedy King of the Yees, currently running at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, particularly about the playwriting process and how artists begin with a preconceived notion only to broaden their scope as they discover the truth of these subjects.
Read more…
Frances Baum Nicholson – The Daily Breeze
There is a moment toward the end of a favorite documentary where people who grew up in the then-segregated African-American neighborhood around Central and Slauson in L.A. talked about the loss of that neighborhood with regret. Entrance into the mainstream was great, they say, but they lost those close-knit community ties. Read more…
Now running through August 6
Dany Margolies - Arts In LA
While Big Brother watches over Broadway as George Orwell’s 1984 plays there through this summer, our own Topanga Canyon is putting the neigh in neighbors with Orwell’s Animal Farm. The legendary author’s decades-old writing remains horrifyingly pertinent. Read more…
Now running through October 1
Hoyt Hilsman - Huffington Post
In the finest tradition of the theatrical two-hander, British playwright Simon Stephens (adapter of the Tony-award winning Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night) has imagined a random encounter between a forty-something eccentric woman and a very ordinary seventy-five year old butcher. Read more…
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly
British playwright Simon Stephens’ Heisenberg tracks the ups and downs in the relationship of an American woman in her 40s and an Irishman in his 70s. First produced at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 2015 and later remounted on Broadway, the play shares its appellation with physicist and 1932 Nobel Prize winner Werner Heisenberg.
Frances Baum Nicholson –The Stage Struck Review
The uncertainty principle of German scientist Werner Heisenberg states that the position and velocity of any object cannot both be measured exactly at the same time. In Simon Stephens’ much-celebrated play, “Heisenberg,” that theory is applied to people – two impressively dissimilar adults who meet awkwardly in a London train station…
Terry Morgan - Stage Raw
I think it’s fair to say that we’ve all seen plenty of “manic pixie dreamgirl” romantic comedies, and even enough of the subset of May/December relationship dramas — but these are sturdy tropes that will always be with us. The latest theatrical iteration of this genre is Simon Stephens’ Heisenberg…… Read more…
Dany Margolies - Arts In LA
Playwright Simon Stephens puts two characters onstage, captures them in conversation, and leaves us knowing no more about themselves our ourselves than we knew at the start of this 80-minute work.
Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA
Annoying, pointless and utterly dated — Simon Stephens’ play Heisenberg perpetuates not only the myth of the ‘manic pixie dream girl’ but fails to question the normalcy and acceptability of May/December romances. Neither are desirable nor relevant outlooks for the 21st century stage.
Now running through August 6