UNDER MILK WOOD – Open Fist Theatre Company at the Atwater Village Theatre

Terry Morgan  –  Stage Raw  If one were to attempt to find a work comparable to Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, it would likely be Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Both plays deal with the mundane and the sacred, and both delve into the complexities of small communities.Read more… Now running through August 25

CRY IT OUT at Atwater Village Theatre

Terry Morgan  –  Stage Raw  Caring for an infant is an important part of life, yet its difficulties are rarely depicted in the arts. While there is no lack of stories about pregnancy and birth, once the child is born, the drama seems to be considered less interesting. Playwright Molly Smith Metzler begs to differ…….Read … Read more

SLAUGHTER CITY at The Historic Lankershim Arts Center

Terry Morgan  –  Stage Raw The plight of the blue-collar worker and the struggle of union versus management is undeniably a worthy subject for drama. This is especially so now, when unions seem to be disappearing and blue-collar workers have watched their jobs become mechanized or shipped overseas. So a play about these topics should … Read more

HENRY IV at the Japanese Gardens on the West L.A. VA campus

Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly Tom Hanks as Falstaff, Joe Morton as King Henry IV and a solid supporting ensemble add up to half a dozen good reasons to see director Dan Sullivan’s staging of Henry IV,….Read more… Ellen Dostal – BroadwayWorld Director Daniel Sullivan‘s adaptation of HENRY IV, Parts 1 & 2 may only be playing in … Read more

RESA FANTASTISKT MYSTISK at the Broadwater Main Stage

Terry Morgan  –  Stage Raw  One of the pleasures of the Hollywood Fringe Festival is discovering something genuinely original amid the minefield of one-person shows. ’s revival of its 1999 production of Resa Fantastiskt Mystisk, written by obscure Swedish playwright Lars Mattsun, is one of these finds.Read more… Now running through June 22

PLUNGE at Son of Semele

Terry Morgan  –  Stage Raw James Joyce in his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man famously wrote, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” That sentiment describes a lot of historical fiction, in which the sins of the past reverberate endlessly down decades or centuries into the present. Read more… … Read more

FOREVER BOUND at Atwater Village Theatre

Terry Morgan – Stage Raw  Steve Apostolina’s Forever Bound is an uncommon play that begins in one genre and ends in another. It’s always difficult to market something that doesn’t fit neatly into one category, so writers are often encouraged not to create anything like that. However, the results of such experiments are usually intriguing artistically. Such … Read more

BELLEVILLE at the Pasadena Playhouse

Terry Morgan  –  Talkin’ Broadway Labeling a work of art as being one particular thing can often be problematic, creating expectations that the piece doesn’t fulfill. Amy Herzog’s play Belleville is being promoted as a Hitchcockian thriller, which it is not. It’s only a thriller in the sense that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a thriller, in that … Read more

WHAT HAPPENED WHEN at Atwater Village Theatre

Ellen Dostal – BroadwayWorld The air between the words is so thick you could cut it with a knife in Daniel Talbott‘s shadowy play about three siblings attempting to survive their dysfunctional family. Each is broken in his or her own way and, as the hairball unravels, the audience must piece together their fragmented story over … Read more

AKUMA-SHIN at the Broadwater Main Stage

Terry Morgan  –  Stage Raw  Alternate reality stories have long been popular, and there are a couple of main reasons for their appeal. First, it’s just fun to extrapolate how history might have proceeded if things had been different. Second, these stories provide an opportunity for authors to use a fictional reality to comment upon … Read more