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 – 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
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly It’s hard to imagine a more tender, more lyrical or more captivating work than this three-person piece from Kulunka Teatro, a company originating from Spain’s Basque Country. Read more… Now running through June 7.
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly Imported from New York City, The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side takes place in the present day but harks back to the counterculture movement of the late 1960s and early 70s. Read more… Now running through June 14.
Terry Morgan – Stage Raw John Bunzel’s new play is reminiscent of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, but more comedic in intent. The story takes place in the milieu of “wealth management” during a fictional financial catastrophe as the various characters attempt to screw each other over or profit from the chaos. Read more… Steven Leigh Morris – … Read more
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly Sometimes it’s OK to be predictable if what you have to say bears saying again. Immediate Family, Paul Oakley Stovall’s first play now making its L.A. debut at the Mark Taper Forum, starts out as a high-spirited comedy, a kind of super-polished sitcom that centers on a group of African-American … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Ron Klier’s new play at Vs. Theatre Company, Gus’s Fashion & Shoes, is the second in a St. Louis–based trilogy about police/minority relations, Cops & Friends of Cops being the first in 2013. The third is yet to come. Read more… Margaret Gray – LA Times The characters in Ron Klier’s new play … Read more
Bob Verini – Stage Raw Talk about your call of the wild! The atavistic urge – the impulse to fall in with nature in its most primitive state – is an old standby in drama and literature, and it’s now being applied to strong effect in My Barking Dog, Eric Coble’s startling two-hander at the Theatre @ … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly Ground Control to Major Tom: David Bowie, Richard Nixon, the Cold War, the women’s liberation movement, early Steven Spielberg movies and a staff-impaired NASA space program from 1973 all combine into a Mel Brooks aesthetic in Bill Robens’ world-premiere farce Entropy, which just opened at Hollywood’s Theatre of NOTE. Read … Read more