It looks like Casa 0101, the 99-seat Boyle Heights theater that has been waging a six-month fight to remain open in the wake of financial setbacks, will not be closing after all, at least through the end of the year....
Ripe Frenzy, Jennifer Barclay's harrowing new stage fiction about an all-too-typical school shooting massacre, packs a wallop that hits like an expertly aimed kick to the emotional solar plexus....
Gina Femia’s all-women twist on the venerable locker-room drama doesn’t exactly reinvent the sports narrative but it does persuasively demonstrate how invigorating it can be to simply reorient hoary sports tropes with a new gender perspective. That fresh spin, plus sizzling choreography by director Rhonda Kohl and uniformly fine-grained performances, are enough to make Femia’s story feel arena-scaled even on Theatre of NOTE’s uncommonly intimate stage....
For a city that is more than 48 percent Latino, the loss of Casa 0101, one of only three all-Latino stages that produce regular seasons of plays in Los Angeles, might be incalculable to its audience, but it would be a Richter-scaled catastrophe to L.A.'s Latinx theater artists. Casa represents a disproportionate amount of the stage roles available to Latina/o actors — lead roles that are essential to every actor for developing the craft that is a prerequisite to better-paying film and TV work....
Before getting to the whats of The Willows, Kerri-Ann McCalla’s family drama about melancholy and traumatic loss, which is getting a polished world premiere at Bootleg Theatre, it may shed some light to talk about the what-it-is-nots....
Why the Americanization of Ishiro Honda’s 1954 kaiju classic, Gojira, should be held up as a primary palimpsest for the rampaging horrors of post-industrial capitalism is just one of the mysteries driving a play that ricochets between parodic mockumentary, whimsical alternative history, allusive movie-geek trivia game and moody metaphysical thriller....
By now it’s an all-too-familiar story: A powerful institution is racked by news of long-standing sexual abuses as the innocent are further victimized by a code of silence that protects the powerful and perpetuates their crimes....
With the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the administration's divisive mainstreaming of alt-right white supremacist hate groups, Allegiance’s sprawling and sometimes unwieldy tale of how the United States summarily stripped 120,000 Japanese-Americans — including 37,000 Angelenos — of their civil rights and incarcerated them in 10 prison camps for the duration of the war today seems harrowingly near....
Justin Tanner returns to the L.A. stage after nearly seven years with El Niño, a bitingly funny look at a dysfunctional Angeleno family and a knowing, caricatured nod to Trump's core supporters....
The play, onstage at the Geffen Playhouse, highlights the talents of Marin Ireland, but the setting and resolution don't convey a deep enough message in these troubling times....
