Theater

GRIEF IN MOTION Christina Harris keeps Deborah Brevoort’s meditation on loss moving with remarkable theatrical urgency There is very little stillness in The Women of Lockerbie, and that turns out to be one of the great strengths of Christina Harris’s superbly directed production at The Actors’ Gang. Deborah Brevoort’s play takes place seven years after…

WISHING FOR MORE Beautiful voices aren’t enough to cast the spell this Sondheim classic demands It seems like there’s always a production of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods running nearby. Last weekend, South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa opened its production, just a week before Morgan-Wixson in Santa Monica opens theirs, so…

A LANDMARK CASE GETS THE SITCOM TREATMENT A pivotal civil-rights case deserves sharper comedy and deeper drama than Howard Skora’s overstuffed retelling provides On September 17, 1998, a 911 caller claiming there was a weapons disturbance sent police into John Lawrence’s Houston apartment. Officers arrested Lawrence and Tyrone Garner under a Texas law criminalizing sex…

GUILT IS SOMEONE ELSE’S BUSINESS Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy makes murder a profession, morality a technicality, and laughter increasingly uncomfortable Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen opens with a man about to be hanged and everyone fussing over procedure. It is 1963. James Hennessy insists the police have the wrong man. His executioner, Harry Wade, is unmoved. Harry…

WHEN THE APOCALYPSE LOSES ITS MAGIC José Rivera’s surreal vision of a world coming apart demands theatrical daring that this earthbound revival rarely delivers What would you do if you lived in the Bronx, God went senile, and your guardian angel left you to fight him with the other angels? This is the scenario of…

A TOWN LEARNS WHAT IT’S WORTH Darko Tresnjak’s blistering production watches Güllen purchase its way toward murder When the Burgomaster (mayor) of Güllen rises in his most solemn civic register and declares that his town would rather starve than have blood on its hands, Claire Zachanassian lets the speech hang. The richest woman in the…

THE HUMAN INTEREST RATE A deeply affecting production makes its unrelieved sadness difficult to shake Kierkegaard shows up late in Samuel D. Hunter’s A Case for the Existence of God, now at Rogue Machine, delivered almost as a throwaway line by a mortgage broker named Keith. Proof of God, he says, isn’t something you build….