Travis Michael Holder – TicketHoldersLA Under the sharply tuned direction of New York theatre producer extraordinaire Eric Krebs, Dan Lauria’s bittersweet dramedy,, in which he costars with former “Bad Seed” Patty McCormack, is often clever and well written. It is occasionally bittersweet, often quite funny, and at times quite poetic. Read more…
Travis Michael Holder – TicketHoldersLA Five years before he won his Pulitzer, James Ijames’ prophetically in-your-face earlier play cries out to us about the horrendous epidemic of brutality perpetrated against innocent and unarmed African-American men and women.This play made it clear the kind of urban poet Ijames was about to become but doesn’t have the … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – Stage Raw. The lure of lurid allure: Benny Hill meets Samuel Beckett in the late Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin’s farcical and deceptively probing play with music (by Alex Kagan). (Levin’s play is translated from the Hebrew by Naaman Tamuz and is being presented by the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in its U.S. … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw Plays we now regard as classics aren’t always well-received when they debut. Like The Birthday Party (reviewed on this site in June), Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts was much disparaged when it appeared in 1881— not for being too cryptic, which was the complaint lodged against Pinter, but for being salacious and grossly offensive. Launched in … Read more
Terry Morgan – Stage Raw One of the definitions of “meta-theatrical” is a theatre piece that constantly reminds the audience that they’re watching a play — one which comments on theatre in general. One famous example of this technique is Our Town, where the Stage Manager — not the narrator, mind you, but explicitly the Stage … Read more
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
Terry Morgan – Talkin’ Broadway Theatre has many functions, and sometimes its job is to remind or teach people about history. The trick, of course, is to do it in such a way that the piece still works as theatre, so it isn’t essentially a PowerPoint presentation with actors instead of graphics. Playwright has an … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly A quartet of Big Idea plays has opened over the past two weeks, exploring the intersections of art, psychology and history. Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play, co-presented by the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble and Evidence Room, has been around since at least 2005, with productions at Arena Stage in Washington, Chicago’s … Read more
ANNAPURNA by Sharr White Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA In playwright Sharr White’s quirky two-person drama, directed by Bart DeLorenzo, a formerly married couple reunites and tries to make sense of their estrangement. Married in real-life actors Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally face off in this odd-ball drama of lost love and recriminations.Read more…
Mutually Assured Destruction by Peter Lefcourt. Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what is wrong with this play and production. The acting is good. The staging is fluid. The storyline is amusing. The French farce underpinnings give the show some energy. The central conceit is clever and well developed… So why doesn’t this play … Read more