Margaret Gray – LA Times Jeremy J. Kamps’ play “Runaway Home,” now premiering at the Fountain Theatre, is set in New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward three years after Hurricane Katrina. The waters may have long receded, but the residents still wander like ghosts through the wreckage of their lives.Read more… Neal Weaver – Stage Raw … Read more
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw Robert Schenkkan’s play, set in 2019, is a dystopian vision of what life in Trump-land might be like two years hence. In a prison meeting room, a black woman, Gloria (Judith Moreland) is interviewing Rick (Bo Foxworth), a white prisoner. She offers him a chance to tell his side of … Read more
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
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly In concept, Stephen Sachs’ Dream Catcher at the Fountain Theatre is a timely play. Directed by Cameron Watson, it details a clash between a young engineer involved in designing a solar-energy plant that would help combat global warming, and a poorly educated Native American woman who objects to the project because it … Read more
Myron Meisel – Stage Raw Citizen: An American Lyric by poet Claudia Rankine, was published to great acclaim last year, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry. In this theatrical realization, it represents an uniquely valuable tool not merely for a keener awareness of the ubiquity of everyday … Read more
Paul Birchall – Stage and Cinema This fascinating drama by playwright Zayd Dohrn is set in the bizarre subculture of women who buy dolls that eerily resemble actual babies. Can this possibly be enough material here for a play? Read more… Bob Verini – Arts In LA Roger Ebert once opined, “It’s not what a movie … Read more
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly “Things aren’t always what they seem” is the main theme of John Biguenet’s play about a strange old woman with magical powers. It’s a piece you want to praise, given how much and how cruelly old women with (or without) magical powers have been maligned over the centuries. Read more… Neal … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Tarell Alvin McCraney’s tender, poetical drama The Brothers Size (Fountain Theatre) and Billy Van Zandt & Jane Milmore’s meta-theatrical farce Drop Dead! (presented by Theatre 68, at North Hollywood’s NoHo Arts Center) share one salient commonality: Each production has moments when the actors recite stage directions about their own characters. Tarell Alvin McCraney’s … Read more
Les Spindle – Edge on the Net In chronicling the beginning of a momentous chapter in the history of gay culture, namely the initial outbreak of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, Larry Kramer’s watershed play “The Normal Heart” offers a deeply moving snapshot of an era, while imparting timeless truths.Read more… Bob Verini … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly …..Stephen Sachs‘ Heart Song, which just opened at the Fountain Theatre, also looks at the capacities of art to overcome the seeming finality of death. Act One is as literal — with explanations about the purpose of art that border on the tendentious — as A Fried Octopus is abstract. Act Two, however, … Read more