Terry Morgan – Stage Raw “Nothing human disgusts me,” goes the famous quote from Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana, and Steven Fechter’s play The Woodsman puts that credo to the test for theater audiences. It deals with the difficult subject of a pedophile trying to resist his baser urges and to become a better man, and it … Read more
Myron Meisel – Stage Raw Allen Ginsberg may not have quite been Walt Whitman, but he was certainly the Walt Whitman of our lifetimes. To paraphrase Andrew Sarris on Orson Welles, while he could be a great bravura poet, he was an incomparable bravura personality. Read more… Now running through June 7.
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly The brainchild of writer/producer Rochelle Perry, Curious Conversations riffs on the characters and themes of Lewis Carroll. The eight one acts, by 8 different playwrights, vary in quality and depth and standard of performance. Read more… Now running through June 28.
Jenny Lower – LA Weekly Oedipus Rex may be one of the best known plays of the western canon, but it gets an alien staging, quite literally, in Ron Sossi’s inventive though uneven production at the Odyssey Theatre. Based on Ellen McLaughlin’s modernist, poetic adaptation of the text, Oedipus Machina transports the action to a vaguely eastern, otherworldly … Read more
Bob Verini – Arts in LA If you took in the luminous revival of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at the Taper in 2013, you’ve already come face-to-face with the force of nature that is John Douglas Thompson, for my money one of the truly great actors in the English-speaking world today. Read more… Margaret Gray … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw One way to tackle your demons is to write a book about them. Another way is to condense your recollections into a solo performance piece that resembles a standup comedy routine. Annabelle Gurwitch has done both. Read more… Now running through June 7.
Paul Birchall – Stage Raw Director Chris DeCarlo’s staging of the 29th anniversary production of playwright Jerry Mayer’s play about marriage and temptation inevitably shows its age — and not just because the work’s sitcom structure and conveniently pat situations lack the ambiguity of turn of Millennial modern romcoms. Read more… Now running through June 28.
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw This play, which provided Tennessee Williams with the first great success in his spectacular but ultimately blighted career, is astonishingly rich, simple, and forthright. That it requires only four actors and a single set has deluded many actors and directors to think it is an easy play to do. But … Read more
Bob Verini – Stage Raw Most people’s command of international finance and investment, I think it’s fair to say, probably cuts not much deeper than the “Money makes the world go around” lyrics from Cabaret. Yet in telling the sorry true-life saga of the titular Houston energy giant and its catastrophic demise, Lucy Prebble’s Enron coolly takes for granted … Read more
David C. Nichols – LA Times Family dysfunction, that age-old staple of the dramatic canon, permeates the walking wounded that populate “The House of Yes” in a respectable, albeit still-gelling 25th anniversary revival at the Zephyr. Read more… Now running through June 14.