Paul Birchall – Stage Raw If your concept of a fairy tale is based on Disney’s saccharine stories in which the Little Mermaid easily finds love or Belle blissfully enjoys the company of the oddly photogenic beast, playwright Mary Zimmerman’s gorgeously rendered adaptation of a number of fantastic stories will frankly blow your mind.Read more… … Read more
Margaret Gray – LA Times At first, Erin Courtney’s play “A Map of Virtue” presents itself as a quirky love story: Sarah (Megan Branch) and Mark (Sam T. West) stand side by side onstage and deliver alternating accounts of the first time they saw each other, as if answering an unseen interviewer’s questions.Read more… Now … Read more
Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen It’s New Year’s Eve in Rotterdam, and Alice (Miranda Wynne) is agonizing over a drafted email she has been meaning to send for a long time—an email in which she finally tells her parents she’s a lesbian.Read more… Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly Human relationships are problematic, whoever … Read more
Frances Baum Nicholson –The Stage Struck Review For the second play of their 96th season, the Whittier Community Theatre has chosen the gently comic “The Curious Savage” by John Patrick. In a time when the battle between decency and avarice is played out in the news and on all forms of media on a regular … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw Twenty-year-old Valerie Hager was down on her luck. She’d split from her boyfriend, lost her job, and owed $3500 in parking tickets which she would need to pay to retrieve her towed car. So when River, her flamboyantly self-assured BFF, suggested Valerie forget about the crummy minimum wage gig and … Read more
Lovell Estell III — Stage Raw Writer/director Susan Chambers scores a modest success with this short coming-of-age tale that meshes allegory with fairy tale, nature myths, and a dash of feminist esprit.Read more… Now running through November 25
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly Set in 1986, Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yohen depicts the unraveling of a 37-year marriage. Although it tumbles off-track in its final third, the play to that point is an astute portrayal of the dynamics of a failed intimacy.Read more… Neal Weaver – Stage Raw The title of Philip Kan Gotanda’s play, Yohen, refers … Read more
Terry Morgan – Stage Raw The subject of deception and the malleability of truth couldn’t be more timely. When the highest levels of government and entire media organizations such as Fox News are openly lying to the populace every day with few consequences, the very value of facts or being truthful comes into question.Read more… … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw American armchair activists receive a solid drubbing in The Wong Street Journal. Kristina Wong’s solo show is not only dynamic, clever and entertaining; it’s also a compelling reminder of the harsh conditions that exist outside the ken of most Americans.Read more… Now running through November 19
Jenny Lower – Stage Raw Antaeus announced Christopher Hampton’s 1987 adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses as the debut of its current season all the way back in June. The director’s note in the program discusses how this pre-revolutionary tale of French aristocratic depravity speaks to our era of the one percent.Read more… Erin Conley – On Stage … Read more