Los Angeles

A ROLLER COASTER RIDE TO THE HEART OF DARKNESS I will always love good theater but, even so, every so often there comes along a play that actually restores one’s faith in the possibilities of theater. Dana H by the brilliant Lucas Hnath is just such a play. And Les Waters’ direction couldn’t be more…

LOOT CONDUCT At a time when drawing room comedies ruled West End theatre, and even the shock of the raw emotions depicted in Osborne’s Look Back in Anger had faded, a complacent London audience enjoyed such safe, heartwarming fare as Hello, Dolly!, and the water-thin comedy There’s a Girl in my Soup. Then in 1966…

A PUNCH IN THE GUT Raw as realism requires, good plays about boxing are more than just  Rocky slugfests. Like Clifford Odets’ seminal  Golden Boy, they transform an atavistic popular distraction into a metaphor for sweet success, the reward of pluck and nerve — or, as the title of Sucker Punch implies, a parable on selling your…

HAS TOLSTOY EVER BEEN SO HOT? In his Pulitzer Prize-winning play,  Anna in the Tropics, Nilo Cruz created the role of striking, velvet-voiced, Cuban Lothario Juan Julian, a lector who is hired to read books to the workers in a 1929 Tampa cigar factory — it alleviates tedium, inadvertently educates them, and, in this case, causes…

BILLY BOY OH BOY Meet Billy, an ex-con sharpshooter who is living his American Dream in 1979. This optimistic showman, romantic, and visionary has encouraged a fraternity of castaways — a Native American and his wife, a car thief, an ex-nurse, an erstwhile bank teller — to join him as entertainers in a troupe about…

GRAFFITI THAT ASKS PERMISSION Carly Uhlenbeek (Jasmine St. Clair), an African American suburban seventh grade girl, seeks answers in playwright David Jacobi’s Ready Steady Yeti Go, a Rogue Machine production that is part of the National New Play Network’s rolling world premiere program. She assembles her friends to reenact the events of a recent hate…

PLENTY TO DESIRE When I was thirteen I discovered Tennessee Williams when I picked up his play A Streetcar Named Desire at the New York Public Library. I don’t know if I fully understood it at that age, but there was one line that not only stayed with me my whole life, but is the…

SHOOTING STAR AIMS, SHOOTS … AND BORES Shooting Star, billed as “A Revealing New Musical” — and getting its World Premiere at the Hudson Theatres in Los Angeles under the direction of Michael Bello — offers us a glimpse of one man’s journey through the world of gay porn. Written by Florian Klein (a.k.a. adult…

HAPPY DAYS IS HERE AGAIN I had never read nor seen Samuel Beckett’s absurdist classic Happy Days, now at the Mark Taper, but was excited at the prospect of seeing the great Dianne Weist in the flesh. Like many people, I’ve loved her ever since Hannah and Her Sisters, one of Woody Allen’s best films,…

THERE’S A LOT AT THIS TABLE At the Table takes place in Catskills, a resort area in the low mountains in E New York State that I hold dear to my heart since I spent many summers there — as many Jewish New Yorkers did. The setting is the house of Nate (Christian Prentice), who…