Deborah Klugman

Actress and playwright Amanda Peet's second staged effort, Our Very Own Carlin McCullough, stars Mamie Gummer as a single mom obsessed with her teenage daughter's tennis talents. The play, exploring mother-daughter relationships, has plenty of drama, which makes it worth watching until the final "play."...

In his Los Angeles stage debut, Tom Hanks, as a bloviating Falstaff, becomes every inch the maddening outrageous clown that Shakespeare must have intended him to be in Henry IV.The funniest moment may be when, in battle, Falstaff collapses and pretends to die before his confused opponent ever touches him with his sword. (The parallel between this character’s gasbag behavior and that of our nation’s narcissistic Bloviator-in-Chief compounds the ironic humor.)...

Steve Apostolina’s dark and thoughtful dramedy, Forever Bound, starts out as two disparate narratives that come together in an intense disquieting way. Commencing as a wry comedy about a nebbish whose life is on the downturn, it culminates as a riveting face-off between good and evil, and highlights just how hard it can be to sever the formidable bonds that bind us to our past....

The theater adaptation of the hit movie entertains with a well-staged and well-executed performance by preteen actors who sing, dance and act up a storm. The grown-ups and music rock, too....

The burden of being prejudged by others is at the core of both the novel and the play. But writer Nambi E. Kelley makes a singular change in her adaptation: She creates a new character, the Black Rat (Noel Arthur), an interior self, savvier and more articulate than the public Bigger (who tends to skulk and sulk), and the inner voice that keeps reminding him of his humiliating pariah status in society....

Like so many ambitious solo shows, aspiration outruns execution. Bellina Logan plays all the characters in her story, but her transitions are not always as clear as they could be....

The play features strong female characters and a reminder of what can happen to ordinary people when democracy falls prey to ruthless, demoniacal villainy (really, you can’t repeat this message too often). But playwright Stephanie Alison Walker's setup is too convenient, and Guerrero’s orchestration of pacing and nuance underscores the shortcomings of the material....

Many societal changes have transpired since Tennessee Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire; watching, you're aware of the gap between the prescribed gender roles of mid-20th century men and women and the relative fluidity of these roles today....

The first play in a three-part trilogy, Elliot: A Soldier's Fugue at the Kirk Douglas Theatre delves into the experience of war for three generations of soldiers in a Puerto Rican-American family. The language is poetic, but onstage, events and emotions transpire in a way that's mostly flat and not all that affecting....