Harvey Perr

SHORT TAKES ON CURRENT LOS ANGELES THEATER AS IT WAS: As Is, written by William M. Hoffman in 1984, when so many of our contemporaries were dying of the AIDS epidemic, still maintains its power. If it is dated at all, it is dated in good ways: it means that our so-called “gay” theater has…

THE TROUBLE WITH BHUTAN I am not advocating that bad directors should face a firing squad in the town square in full view of the entire community. But I have seen three plays now that were directed by Elina de Santos and, in baseball parlance, three strikes and you’re out. In none of the plays…

WHAT’S COOKING IN HER KITCHEN? In the bracingly intelligent and potentially powerful Hermetically Sealed, playwright Kathryn Graf has set out to explore the ways in which families deceive themselves and how, in order to protect each other, they somehow manage to effectively destroy their own lives. Since each secret is revealed as it might be…

TENNESSEE W’S MASTER CLASS FOR ACTORS The New American Theatre production of Five Beauties (or, as it turned out to be at the performance I attended, Four Beauties) is not like going to the theater at all: it’s like attending an acting class in which each scene is beautifully executed and is unified by the…

DANCE MACABRE Although there are only two performances left of the Zombie Joe’s Underground production of The Cask of Amontillado, this is a piece that should be extended; if it is given a chance to find its audience, it could run as long as ZJU’s Urban Death. This is art in its purest form; Zombie…

ON ONE’S VERY BEST POOR BEHAVIOR Ian is a monster. Oh, not your fire-eating dragon sort of monster. Quite possibly you’ve met this kind of monster yourself. He’s British; he’s smart; he’s opinionated; he’s articulate; he is, more often than not, an alcoholic, although the kind of alcoholic who, you are bound to admit, can…

PROSPERO IS UP TO HIS OLD TRICKS There seems to be a plan afoot at Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre Group to give us The Complete Abridged Works of William Shakespeare, a project that could happily go on for years. Purists, who object to cutting even one line of the Bard’s work, may be dismayed, but…

THE HAPPIEST CORPSE I’VE EVER SEEN How many reasons do you need to rush out and get tickets for the Reprise revival of Cabaret? Let me offer a few. First of all, this is 2011, and a better time to see Cabaret could not be imagined. That may be Berlin at the dawn of Nazism…

HIGH CULTURE UNDER A MALIBU SKY Anne Bogart is not one to shy away from her own directorial eccentricities. As the American Theater’s Queen of Deconstruction, she has had a formidable career looking with fresh eyes at old texts, investigating them and re-inventing them and, at her best, encouraging audiences to look at the plays…

WHEN YOU USE MACE, USE WITH DISCRETION Playwright Kristoffer Diaz has an ear for unleashing the poetic possibilities in “street-smarts” vernacular; and director Edward Torres has an eye for how to turn a simple idea into an explosively theatrical metaphor; and, together, they have made of Diaz’s hip-hop comedy The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity…

THE ZOMBIE JOE AESTHETIC With each new production, inch by inch, layer by layer, we get closer and closer to tasting the artichoke heart of Zombie Joe. It is not a question anymore of which production is better; it is a question of how complex the new images are and how they sustain the mystique…

WHAT IS ART ANYWAY? What if you were an alcoholic ex-bartender who lived in a mobile home in a trailer park in Bakersfield that was furnished with junk bought from rummage sales and who found, in the back of someone’s garage, a painting that you didn’t really like, but, after all, at $3.00, it seems…

OUR OWN PRIVATE GRAND GUIGNOL I hesitate to call anyone a genius on the basis of two productions, but if   Sotto Voce alerted me to the unique talents of Zombie Joe, then Urban Death, the beautifully strange and ever evolving Saturday late night show at Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre Group, confirmed and validated my impression…

TEATRO LINEA DE SOMBRA: AMARILLO In the mixed-media event par excellence of RADAR L.A.,   Amarillo is perhaps the most spectacular of the international events that are giving   intellectually curious and eager Los Angeles theater audiences a special frisson of excitement this week. But it doesn’t stop at being visually arresting and aurally hypnotic; it builds…