Los Angeles

THE BUSINESS OF FAITH The late Irish playwright Brian Friel’s Faith Healer premiered some 40 years ago and is now considered one of his greatest works. It is a memory play with three characters, told in a series of monologues. Frank is an Irish faith healer who takes his one-man show to isolated villages and…

BRAIN CRAMPS One of the brainiest plays since, well, British playwright Nick Payne’s other brainy play, Constellations, Incognito (2014) contains Payne’s usual assortment of short scenes and quantum physics-like, obfuscating construction. But I don’t buy it this time. And not because I don’t get it. (Although I don’t get it.) This is Payne showing off…

TEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA I’m not really sure if director Alana Dietze could have done anything more with The Wolves, a dramatically inert slice-of-life one act that follows an all-female indoor soccer team over a succession of pre-game warm-ups. Playwright Sarah DeLappe’s Pulitzer-finalist (?!?!?!?!) is awash in the perfect patois of…

ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF A PLAY Anarchy is not chaos. The former means “without law” and the latter means “without form.” This is an important distinction to consider in a play that intends to make an argument for anarchy. After a government scandal, a schizoid anarchist poses as certain government officials at a police station in…

LOVE CONQUERS COMMON SENSE My takeaway about Oscar Wilde in David Hare’s intellectually stimulating but overly static play of ideas, The Judas Kiss, now at Boston Court, is this: The literary genius, raconteur and bon vivant was not the wisest of men, making him largely liable for his own downfall. It may have been that…

TOO MANY CHOICES If Chekov’s characters could be said to be trapped by society, circumstance, and their own neuroses, the characters in playwright Nicky Silver’s Too Much Sun, now at the Odyssey Theatre, are more spoiled for choice. Money and opportunities give them physical possibilities; the guilt of those who have failed them and their…

CRIPPLE THE FUN Funny and heartbreaking, Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan is nothing less than a slalom run of emotional ups and downs and plot twists and turns. Antaeus Theatre’s production doesn’t necessarily hug every curve like Olympians, but the many snow jobbing characters in this 1996 dark comedy still leave an impression. As…

HYPER-ACTIVISM A promising hip-hop group formed by two childhood friends — a white writer and a black hype man — is thrown off its beat by racial tensions in the West Coast premiere of a powerful, funny and meaningful drama: Hype Man  by Idris Goodwin. The Fountain Theatre has opened it’s 2019 season with the third…

WITNESSING UGANDA IS AMAZING, EVEN THOUGH THE SHOW NEEDS WORK Griffin is a young black New York actor in search of more than a career. When he is kicked out of his church choir because he’s gay, it prompts him to join a volunteer program working with orphaned youth in Uganda. Once there in the…

UNFORGETTABLE AND FORGETTABLE AT THE SAME TIME Well, here’s a show that, while it doesn’t defy description, is nonetheless perplexing. As with Matthew Borne’s Cinderella, now playing across town, only you can decide whether or not the convoluted goings on play second fiddle to the astounding talent and dancing on stage. Co-written with Coleman Domingo…