Los Angeles

A VERY GOOD GRIEF This funny but disturbing update of Charles M. Schultz’s Peanuts comic strip first arrived at the Blank Theatre, after which  Worst First Kiss Productions wisely utilized the Hollywood Fringe Festival to create a six-performance extension. I certainly hope there are more performances to come, for  Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead  contained…

A BRUTAL TRUE-LIFE EVENT IS THE BASIS FOR  POWERFUL THEATER Katharine Cortez’ 80-minute take on the after-effects of the brutal slaying of 49 people at the LGBT dance-bar, PULSE, a year ago June 12th has been sensitively and provocatively directed by veteran Elina de Santos as part of the Hollywood Fringe Festival. In The Valley of…

PARALLEL UNIVERSES AND THE PHYSICS OF LOVE I have a brother-in-law who is a mathematician and a brother who’s an astrophysicist. Both have tried to explain to me what they do, with little success. Solar winds, dark matter, and pure math remain as impenetrable to me as fantasy football. So, I approached Nick Payne’s Constellations…

THE WAR WITHIN THE WAR As sturdily written and swiftly moving as it was in 1982, Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play remains an enduring testament to the home front battles that African-American soldiers fought during World War II, within their ranks as well as with white comrades in arms. It’s a kind of upfront, downhome…

ELEMENTARY BUT AMUSING Unbound Productions takes original material and sets it in vaguely similar settings using  carefully-chosen actors and company directors; the company has been producing site-specific plays since 2008. Their latest concoction is an amusing mash-up (as they describe it) of three Conan Doyle short stories starring Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, Inspector Lestrade, Irene Adler…

LOVING YOUR OPPRESSOR The audience is delighted when a character in Alexi Kaye Campbell’s beautifully written play The Pride tells another, “Stop sucking the dick of your oppressor!” It’s a moment of explosive clarity, in a work that never stops asking questions. Is it possible a gay man in closeted London of 1958 might live…

THERE’S NO INTERFERING WITH GREAT THEATER What an extraordinary piece of theater was this Hollywood Fringe entry from Pepperdine University in Malibu. The Interference confronts the dilemma of how rape or other abuse victims can find justice in a corrupt world. Lynda Radley wrote this 75-minute piece with Pepperdine’s drama department in mind. The title…

IT’S LIKE REAL LIFE, BUT BETTER About a decade ago, I was having a miserable time dating. The age of electronica was firmly in place, and chat rooms, lengthy bios, and requested cock shots were making me ill, and the cost-benefit was low to say the least. To quote Rodney Dangerfield, I gave up dating…

THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT A WARHOL If you thought Pop Artist Andy Warhol only referenced and defined mass culture and consumerism through replicated images of Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, think again. Standing among Paddy Chayefsky as one of the most prescient mavens regarding culture and television, Warhol was a prolific writer’”and talker: In 1976,…

FLAGGED DOWN Who hasn’t  walked away from some bad dates thinking, “Jesus, that was like being in a play.” Well, now Capital W — a theater company that offers unconventional, immersive, and site-specific theater — has created a bad date for you in the aptly titled Red Flags. This one-on-one improvisational play, in which you participate…