HOME/SICK at the Odyssey Theatre

Myron Meisel – Stage Raw Most of American society tends to regard terrorism as a contemporary phenomenon, part of our unshakeable conviction in the uniqueness of our own experience. In fact, terrorism has been a constant in world politics since at least the French Revolution, inevitably perceived in terms ranging from ignoble to glorious. So … Read more

SPEAKING IN TONGUES at the Matrix Theatre

Myron Meisel – Stage Raw Australian Theatre Company, formed by local Aussie talent to showcase their national theater literature, returns to the Matrix after their successful 2014 debut, Holding the Man, with a double presentation (not in repertory) of two major opuses playing alternately through a four week run: Read more… Now running through July 2

HEDDDA GABLER at the Antaeus Theatre Company

Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly If you’re someone who usually dismisses 19th-century theater classics as stuffy and stiff, you might want to reconsider and go see Hedda Gabler at Antaeus Theatre Company, where Jaimi Paige delivers a mesmerizing performance as the beautiful and manipulative title character. Read more… Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze Who is … Read more

THE HAIRY APE at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble

Myron Meisel – Stage Raw Class warfare has surged and ebbed in the U.S. public consciousness during harder or more prosperous times throughout the past century, but the distorted perversion that it is something waged by the poor upon privileged victims gets exposed as a disingenuous lie by Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 The Hairy Ape – an anguished … Read more

HONKY at Rogue Machine at the MET Theatre

Myron Meisel – Stage Raw For a considerable time now, it has become exceptionally difficult to shock an audience, a gambit that used to be an important arrow in the artist’s quiver. Nevertheless, in a society where in recent years the most dreaded circumstance has become to feel in any colorable way “awkward”, discomfiting the … Read more

ENDGAME at the Kirk Douglas Theatre

Myron Meisel – Stage Raw Moments before heading out to witness Alan Mandell’s staging of Endgame at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, just before sundown, I lit my first yahrtzeit candle to commemorate the first anniversary on the ancient lunar calendar of the death of my father. Leaving it to burn in my absence permitted me to approach Samuel Beckett’s … Read more

CASA VALENTINA at the Pasadena Playhouse

Myron Meisel – Stage Raw I remember, back when young and impecunious, sneaking into the house during first intermission to catch the last two acts of Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, only to be so smitten that I returned the following day to buy a ticket to see the first act and stay again for the … Read more

DIRT at the Raven Playhouse

Myron Meisel – Stage Raw While Alejandro G. Iñárritu customarily and pretentiously inflated the purported weight of the soul in his 2003 movie 27 Grams, Bryony Lavery more tangibly measures the palpable bulk of a dead human body in her insightfully written Dirt, a West Coast premiere presented by Rogue Machine Theatre with SRS Production Wing. Read more… Now running … Read more

WOMEN LAUGHING ALONE WITH SALAD at the Kirk Douglas Theatre

Margaret Gray – LA Times Is “Women Laughing Alone With Salad” the first play inspired by an Internet meme? In 2011 the feminist website the Hairpin published stock photographs of slender models appearing to exult over forkfuls of mixed greens. We’d all seen these images in advertisements, but we’d never really looked at them, or … Read more