Theater

LOVE AND TOLERANCE BEGIN AT HOME Debra Jo Rupp is like a hurricane in miniature. She takes us inside a character’s small, unexpected, interior storms. We see and feel her mind and emotions churning. Sometimes she lets all that energy propel itself outward, and she bounces around the stage with adorable comic effect. Other times…

BLACK COMEDY, KITCHEN SINK DRAMA & ONE  FECKIN’ MOTHER While the horror and suspense aren’t as delectable as previous productions of The Beauty Queen of Leenane — Martin McDonagh’s 1996 black comedy — the dark humor, bleakness, and romance positively boil over, making Capricorn Eleven Productions’ revival a recommended trip. For 20 years, 40 year-old spinster…

18 & OVER THE MOON You gotta love a revue that starts with a song, “Turn off Your Fucking Phone.” Even better is that Ammunition Theatre Company — which gave us the astounding Giant Void in My Soul this summer — ups the ante with this modern olio for grown-ups. Creative dude par excellence Michael…

MODERN LOSS MEETS THE ORPHEUS MYTH A superb cast tackles life and death in José Rivera’s new play The Untranslatable Secrets of Nikki Corona, now in its world premiere at the Geffen Playhouse. It is an imaginative tale of a woman searching for meaning in the suicide of her twin sister. She engages the help…

AN EXTRAORDINARY PERFORMER IN A POWERFUL PLAY Produced by the Australian Theatre Company along with Skylight Theatre,  Conor McDermottroe’s one-man play  Swansong and André de Vanny’s pile-driving performance will stay with you long after the 65-minute one-act ends. Meet Austin ‘Occi’ Byrne, the abused illegitimate child of a single mother growing up in the 1960s on the…

MURDER WITHOUT END Sha’Leah Nikole Stubblefield is already a mesmerizing, ethereal presence on stage when you take a seat for Rogue Machine’s American Saga Gunshot Medley: Part 1, now in its American premiere at the MET Theatre. She is the High Priestess of Souls, perched in a graveyard, resplendent in a vermillion gown. Her garment…

WE ARE THE MEAN GIRLS The subhead of Jocelyn Bioh’s 2017 play, now at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, is alluring but ultimately misleading. School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play  is not merely a lighthearted twist on the popular film or its giddy siblings. This tale of a teenage queen bee and…

THE BIRTH OF TRUMP’S RACIAL BLUE-COLLAR DIVIDE Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage places much of the action of Sweat, now at the Mark Taper Forum, in a working-class bar in Reading, Pennsylvania, where floor workers from a nearby factory meet every evening to celebrate their comradery and drown their considerable sorrows. Though set in 2000 and…

THE WORLD IS FLAT Musical revues are a tricky business. While highly enjoyable and entertaining, even high profile compilations such as  Side by Side by Sondheim  and the Fats Waller songbook  Ain’t Misbehavin’  amount to little more than glorified cabaret shows. Jukebox musicals a la  Smokey Joe’s Café (Leiber and Stoller) and the long running Broadway smash  Jersey Boys  (Frankie Valli and…

THE MOTHER OF THEM ALL “Don’t call me a liar,” a mother says. “But you lied,” responds her daughter simply. And all holy hell breaks loose. In I Go Somewhere Else from Playwrights’ Arena at the Atwater Village Theatre the “flat circle of time” gives life to the daughter at three ages, roughly 10, 30,…

RED SCARE IN BROOKLYN I was at a dinner party in New York once and met a 97-year-old woman who embodied a kind of Upper West Side left-wing glamour I find intoxicating. She had grown up in a family of Jewish intellectuals and recounted terrible tensions at the dinner table. “I was a socialist,” she…