Los Angeles

A MILD CASE OF THE CREEPS Ah, Halloween — All Hallows’ Day, Allhallowtide, Jack-o’-lanterns, the madcap lads of West Hollywood, the troops of pint-sized witches, Iron Men and Disney princesses marauding the city’s better neighborhoods lugging trick-or-treat bags bulging with Gummy Bears, Bit-O-Honeys, and Bazooka Gum, and of course the edgy saturnalia that infests Hollywood…

A GHOST STORY THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF TO DEATH It’s 2012 in Sherman Oaks, CA, when Thai-American life-insurance salesman Max (David Huynh) begins sleepwalking and violently lashes out at his pregnant wife Bincy (Christine Corpuz), prompting her protective Thai-born father Somboon (Alberto Isaac) to spirit her away and attempt a homespun exorcism. Max survives a second-story…

WHEN GRIEF MEETS THE ALGORITHM The terrible beauty of grief is that it makes us do irrational things with the most rational tools. In Lauren Gunderson‘s anthropology, now in its North American premiere at Rogue Machine Theatre, a Silicon Valley software engineer named Merril uses artificial intelligence to resurrect her missing sister Angie, only to…

BRAIDS AND BELONGING Some plays don’t announce themselves with spectacle. They invite you in through a metal grate, into a cramped Harlem salon where the air smells of braiding gel and the television plays Nollywood movies on loop. Before you know it, you’re laughing, aching, realizing how invested you’ve become in the fate of women…

GHOSTS OF WAR, SHADOWS OF BROTHERHOOD Looking back fifty years, who doesn’t wish they’d acted differently? Decisions made in a moment can have eternal consequences. Ever help your brother commit a murder? Was it self-defense? What would the police think? Is violence ever justified? Tom Jenkins and Alan McRae In Parallel Process, written and directed…

THE RADIANT DISORDER OF TIM VENABLE’S TEENAGE INFERNO Rogue Machine is presenting Tim Venable’s intense and disquieting new play Adolescent Salvation, which arrives not as a tidy debutante but as a brilliant troublemaker. It lurches, it burns, it contradicts itself. It is alive in ways most new plays are not. Venable has a gift for…

DRAGONS, DOOMSDAY, AND DAZZLE The Road Theatre Company launches its 34th season with N.T. Vandecar’s Otherkin, a bold, visually stunning new work staged by Christina Carlisi in her directorial premiere. Even when its mythology gets dense, the production keeps you hooked, partly because it looks fantastic, but mostly because it’s anchored by the beating heart…

OH, WHAT A NIGHT Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana (1961) may be viewed as the finish of a journey the playwright began twenty years earlier with The Glass Menagerie (1944). The one was his first critical and commercial success, the other his last. After Iguana, Williams would continue to write plays and one-acts…

WHAT DOGS REALLY THINK ABOUT UNCONDITIONAL LOVE Those of us who have ever lived with a beloved canine companion (I hesitate to use the word “owned” since I question who really owns whom) certainly know the amount of time spent happily together sharing human concerns and feelings with no hope of a canine verbal response….

WEST SIDE SNORING Astoundingly unsatisfying, LA Opera’s many-headed Hydra production of West Side Story, directed with no sense of urgency by Francesca Zambello, opened tonight to a crowd largely made up of donors and subscribers dressed to the nines. Oddly cast, oddly acted, and oddly staged, my head was reeling at the amount of money…

ONE MAN, TWO HOURS TOO LONG Ask yourself how much you liked The Play That Goes Wrong series. That’s a pretty good indicator as to your enjoyment of Richard Bean’s 2011 play, One Man, Two Guvnors, now running at A Noise Within. If you liked it, stop reading and go. You’ll have a great time….

Ragtime is the epic musical by Terrence McNally (book), with music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens (based on the novel by E.L. Doctorow). It weaves together stories of a Jewish immigrant, a Harlem pianist, an upper-class white woman, and historical figures — all pursuing the American Dream amidst societal change, prejudice, and…

TRACES OF POSSIBILITY Premiering Off-Broadway in 1989, Cindy Lou Johnson’s Brilliant Traces is one of those plays that can be either mesmerizing or exasperating and tiresome. Lacking a firm idea of what it wants to be, Soul Gym Productions’ new mounting at the Hudson for a brief three-day run, fell firmly in the latter. In the middle of…