Tony Frankel

PARTS OF A BODY Part Albee, part Ionesco, part mystery thriller, part Doubt, part Groundhog Day and — sadly — all red herrings, Lee Blessing’s 2005 A Body of Water can’t decide what it wants to be in the end — which is a shame because individual parts of this body are bracing. (Actor Co-op’s…

HERE’S SOMETHING THAT WILL INTEREST YOU This is the second show this year in L.A. to take head-on the insanity of modern journalism (the insanity being that while newspapers deliver so-called news, they gotta make a buck, so sensationalism often wins out [ask Hearst], but now we have the interenet to contend with, where any…

IT’S THE HIGH SCHOOL SHOW THAT I WISH I WROTE IN HIGH SCHOOL The thing that looks like a high school vanity project at the Geffen Playhouse is actually a world premiere with a lot of bucks behind it. While I certainly appreciate that Qui Nguyen of the self-described “geek” theater company Vampire Cowboys in…

CARYL ME HOME When the author is famed English playwright Caryl Churchill, theater about death and life’s surmounting surrealism isn’t depressing at all; it’s exhilarating. The author of Cloud Nine, Owners and Top Girls has written many short works as well, and right now two great one-acts are being given a minor production by Open…

AT DAY’S END Thanks to Lanie Robertson’s bedrock-basic script, Wren T. Brown’s dedicated staging, Karole Foreman’s extraordinarily vulnerable performance, and Stephan Terry’s elegant piano playing, Ebony Rep’s 90-minute revival of Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill pays full homage to Billie Holiday’s heroism and heartbreak. Unlike her famous “God Bless the Child,” Lady Day…

AFTER THE FLOOD Until the Flood lasts only 70 minutes. But its concentrated running time delivers a devastating drama. A ton of truth-telling now on tour at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, this 2016 one-act is the creation of actor, poet and oral historian Dael Orlandersmith. She becomes the partisans, witnesses, survivors and, above all, inhabitants…

YELLOW JOURNALISM, BLUE PLANET — UNCERTAIN FUTURES Propaganda has always existed. It’s when people promote and publicize their agenda utilizing biased or misleading information, a perfect tool for predomination, profit, and/or political power. With the advent of the internet, propaganda such as yellow journalism — which uses scandal-mongering, sensationalism and exaggeration of news events to…