Michael M. Landman-Karny

ALLIES WITH STRINGS ATTACHED Two Black women, separated by 164 years, discover that everyone offering help wants something in return Only one character in Dominique Morisseau’s Confederates says the title word out loud. Sara, an enslaved woman copying Confederate troop movements off her master’s desk, has overheard Master Dan talking strategy in his office. She…

THE TRUTH WAS ALREADY OUT THERE A haunting mystery of family trauma loses some of its power when the answers come too easily Álvaro has a grievance with The X-Files. In the series’ 25th episode, Fox Mulder finds a frightened teenager hiding in a bathroom stall at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory. The boy tells Mulder…

A HOUSE NOT QUITE WORTH LOSING Antaeus assembles a superb cast for Shaw’s comedy of a doomed society, but the production lacks the grandeur and dread to make its downfall devastating In 1920 the Theatre Guild asked George Bernard Shaw for the rights to revive The Devil’s Disciple. He offered them the premiere of Heartbreak…

ALL’S WELL THAT BEDS WELL Keiko Green’s provocative comedy finds plenty of laughs in the tangled relationships of college life, but its questions about consent are harder to resolve Marianne is named after the girl her father meant to sleep with. Back in their small, religious farm town, teenage Benny had his eye on Anna’s…

A LANDMARK CASE GETS THE SITCOM TREATMENT A pivotal civil-rights case deserves sharper comedy and deeper drama than Howard Skora’s overstuffed retelling provides On September 17, 1998, a 911 caller claiming there was a weapons disturbance sent police into John Lawrence’s Houston apartment. Officers arrested Lawrence and Tyrone Garner under a Texas law criminalizing sex…

GUILT IS SOMEONE ELSE’S BUSINESS Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy makes murder a profession, morality a technicality, and laughter increasingly uncomfortable Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen opens with a man about to be hanged and everyone fussing over procedure. It is 1963. James Hennessy insists the police have the wrong man. His executioner, Harry Wade, is unmoved. Harry…

A TOWN LEARNS WHAT IT’S WORTH Darko Tresnjak’s blistering production watches Güllen purchase its way toward murder When the Burgomaster (mayor) of Güllen rises in his most solemn civic register and declares that his town would rather starve than have blood on its hands, Claire Zachanassian lets the speech hang. The richest woman in the…

THE HUMAN INTEREST RATE A deeply affecting production makes its unrelieved sadness difficult to shake Kierkegaard shows up late in Samuel D. Hunter’s A Case for the Existence of God, now at Rogue Machine, delivered almost as a throwaway line by a mortgage broker named Keith. Proof of God, he says, isn’t something you build….

ROUGHING IT This new musical still has considerable work to do Carl Jung called the work individuation: integrating the selves we invent with the self that has to live in the world. Wild Child shows it understands the idea in a single stage direction. Near the end, the teenage protagonist Rina finishes the song she…

DONIZETTI’S BURIED TREASURE AND RUBBLE POP finds music worth hearing in a comedy better left buried Pacific Opera Project did not pull Il fortunato inganno (The Fortunate Deception) from a library shelf. Artistic director Josh Shaw traced the score to Italy and a 1998 revival at the Festival della Valle d’Itria, three years after its…

A MOST ACCOMMODATING DISASTER Frisch’s comedy leaves no one comfortably outside the joke Gottlieb Biedermann tells his wife and his maid that even if he had three spare beds standing empty, taking in a stranger would still be out of the question. He says this in one breath. In the next, he offers the stranger…

THE BLUES COME WITH A PRICE Power, ownership, and exploitation run through a sharply realized production of August Wilson’s classic A stew uses whatever is in the house. Carrots. Potatoes. A piece of meat, if there is one. Maybe the marrow worked out of the bone. Then dinner ends. What remains sits in the pot,…

GREASE STILL HAS ITS GROOVE Altadena Music Theatre returns after devastating loss with Rydell High, right on schedule The year is 1959. Rock and roll is reshaping American culture, the Sexual Revolution is just around the corner, and Grease captures a generation on the cusp of change. In its original incarnation, the musical was a…