Los Angeles

WHEN METAPHORS BECOME MONSTERS Art thrives when it dances on the edge of a razor — flaunting itself and teasing us — fully embracing the risk of toppling over at any moment and smashing itself to smithereens. In Forever Bound, a world premiere at the Atwater Village Theatre, playwright Steve Apostolina, director Anne Hearn Tobolowsky,…

BLENDING BANANAS AND BORSCHT Mark Harelik’s 1985 play The Immigrant is based on the story of his grandparents, Haskell and Leah Gorehlik, immigrants from Russia who settled in the tiny central-Texas town of Hamilton in 1909, and were the only Jews there. Haskell has arrived in America to escape the pogroms; now, he must gather…

SPLITSVILLE Five years after its world premiere, L.A. is just now getting Amy Herzog’s  disturbing domestic thriller. Both praised and not, the controversy with this one-act has been more over the playwright’s construction — Herzog writes herself into a corner — than the subject matter. Was it worth the wait? For the first hour and a…

A HONEYMOON IN GLENDALE More fun than walking away a few bucks ahead from a black jack table, this pell-mell, silly-sweet, old-fashioned musical comedy (ya know, gangsters, lovers, Elvis impersonators, a curse) just couldn’t find an audience when it landed on Broadway in 2015. But that’s why we have Musical Theatre Guild, which takes rarely…

A BLUES REVUE A female-centric revue from 1980, Sheldon Epp’s Blues in the Night celebrates the melancholic but often very humorous songs of black American folk origin. The blues as we know them today developed in the rural southern US toward the end of the 19th century, finding a wider audience in the 1940s as…

STAGING A DIRTY WAR It’s 1979 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where people are disappearing right off the street. The so-called “Dirty War” waged by the military Junta against its own people is in full-swing. Josefina (Denise Blasor), a  staunch homemaker in her 60s, and Carolina (Arianna Ortiz), her militant daughter, are searching for “Caro’s” pregnant daughter…