Jenny Lower

Mary Laws' newest play holds up a funhouse mirror to that most cherished of American institutions: the wholesome suburban family. A self-described “big-time Texan” (“I fucking love Texas,” she says), Laws, who's just 30, moved to L.A. following graduation from the Yale School of Drama to pursue a career in......

When Phylicia Rashad first agreed to direct Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, an August Wilson play dealing with racial exploitation in the recording industry in 1920s Chicago, she mused about the way in. The answer, she heard herself say, was music. At first, she took that literally. “What I’ve discovered in......

Derek DelGaudio’s new solo show at the Geffen Playhouse’s blackbox theater is a lot different from other one-man ventures. For one thing, there’s magic. And unlike the impulse to overshare that weighs down so many other autobiographical efforts, DelGaudio cloaks his personal storytelling in mythological allusions and tall-tale imagery, casting......

More than any other contemporary playwright that comes to mind, Sarah Ruhl’s characters inhabit worlds wholly her own. Even when she adopts a historical setting, as with In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), her lyrical sensibility fashions heightened realities, where a house of string or a dead man’s......

Holly, the transgressive, tangerine-haired rocker protagonist of Bed, Sheila Callaghan's world-premiere play now onstage at Echo Theater Company, is a rare stage creature. More than once, other characters describe her as feral. Played by Kate Morgan Chadwick, she first enters on all fours, crawling as if through a dream­scape, clawing......

The urgent imperative behind the title of Send Me Back to Slavery, a new web series that recently debuted on BET.com to honor Black History Month, answers a question that seems almost too provocative to ask. Assuming it were possible, why would any sane person want to return to such......

The Shoplifters, Morris Panych’s 2014 comedy having its West Coast premiere at the Victory Theatre in Burbank, tries to put a goofy spin on some not-so-funny topics: high-strung rookie cops, overzealous right-wing Christians and the San Andreas Fault–sized gap between the rich and poor. This last point is epitomized by......

Though the Latino Theater Company’s newest production never delves into contemporary politics, it’s hard to imagine a more direct or effective counter-narrative to the kind of xenophobic propaganda that so often dominates immigration debates. ’57 Chevy presents Emmy-winning writer Cris Franco’s first-person account of his family’s legal relocation from Mexico......