Michael M. Landman-Karny

THREE SYLVIAS, ZERO THRILLS Beth Hyland’s world premiere at the Geffen Playhouse arrives with the kind of literary bait that makes theater people clasp their reusable water bottles in delight. Sylvia Plath’s ghost returns to her old Boston apartment. A present-day novelist moves in. The novelist unravels as her marriage curdles and her deadline circles…

TWO MONOLOGUES IN SEARCH OF A DIALOGUE Justin Tanner has spent decades making chaos look easy. Those early Cast Theatre productions like Pot Mom and Zombie Attack trafficked in a particular brand of Los Angeles mayhem — high energy and unruly and knowing. With My Son the Playwright, now receiving its world premiere at Rogue…

HERBERT ROSS’S BOHÈME RETURNS Beauty polished, questions still lingering Puccini’s tale may be endlessly familiar, yet the recent Los Angeles staging shows how even the most well-trodden path can still feel unsettled and full of open questions. For those new to the work, the opera traces two parallel romances among struggling artists in 1830s Paris….

AMAZING THEATER HERE AND NOW Kai A. Ealy stands in a doorway wearing a coat that looks like it weighs forty pounds. Maybe it does. His Herald Loomis has just walked off seven years of forced labor on Joe Turner’s chain gang, and the weight is literal: bones, memory, rage, the specific gravity of stolen…

WHEN GRIEF MEETS THE ALGORITHM The terrible beauty of grief is that it makes us do irrational things with the most rational tools. In Lauren Gunderson‘s anthropology, now in its North American premiere at Rogue Machine Theatre, a Silicon Valley software engineer named Merril uses artificial intelligence to resurrect her missing sister Angie, only to…

BRAIDS AND BELONGING Some plays don’t announce themselves with spectacle. They invite you in through a metal grate, into a cramped Harlem salon where the air smells of braiding gel and the television plays Nollywood movies on loop. Before you know it, you’re laughing, aching, realizing how invested you’ve become in the fate of women…

The Radiant Disorder of Tim Venable’s Teenage Inferno [Contributing writer: Nick McCall] Rogue Machine is presenting Tim Venable’s intense and disquieting new play Adolescent Salvation, which arrives not as a tidy debutante but as a brilliant troublemaker. It lurches, it burns, it contradicts itself. It is alive in ways most new plays are not. Venable…