Bill Raden

Taking the true measure of any stage scene has little to do with box office receipts or number of productions or even stage awards. Rather, it is found in the vitality and vibrancy of experimental work — that ontological frontier of performance, the poetic imagination and the head-scratching unknown where......

A lot of gender theory has passed under the bridge since Arthur Miller dramatized the Salem witch trials as the tragedy of a man martyred by femme-fatale vindictiveness and an unforgiving wife. In a sense, the stage has been begging ever since for a compelling feminist corrective to The Crucible’s......

In the world of immersive theater, Los Angeles experimental playwright-director Annie Lesser is a master miniaturist. Her intensely interactive, site-specific “experiences” explore a poetics of extreme intimacy, which achieves an uncanny exhilaration by literally placing a theatergoer in whisper-close proximity to an actor as an active character in dramatic narratives that......

Playwright Eric O’Meara is hardly the first to have turned to a real-life 1960s rock idol in order to explore the driving ambition, extreme solipsism and high-flying excess that seem to be occupational hazards for pop celebrities cursed with talent, artistic vision and too-early success. Its casualties are legion in......

The two postwar American novelists laureate perhaps most associated with satirically probing the military-industrial banalities of Cold War conformity and midcentury alienation are Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut. But if Pynchon is the rhizomatic chronicler of what lit professors once called “the postmodern condition,” Vonnegut, as adaptor-director Scott Rognlien compellingly......

Paris had its Théâtre de l'Œuvre, Zurich has the Cabaret Voltaire, Austin has the Fusebox Festival and New York has its COIL — revolutionary launch pads of contemporary performance where the "live arts" have taken a quantum leap into the cultural unknown. Since 2012, Los Angeles has joined that cosmopolitan......

It's difficult to express the exhilarating sense of the uncanny produced by an Annie Lesser immersive stage show. Since her L.A. debut at the 2015 Hollywood Fringe Festival, the experimental theater auteur has fearlessly explored a densely poetic, deeply intimate and intensely personal dimension of the actor-audience relationship where few......

There is a sense both of sumptuous grandeur and of the epic in A Mexican Trilogy: An American Story. The former is due entirely to José Luis Valenzuela’s handsome and masterful production, while the latter can be chalked up to playwright Evalina Fernández’s big ambitions. Her quasi-musical chronicle of three......

“We don’t see things as they are,” declares an opening title of Anaïs: A Dance Opera, “we see them as we are.” The statement, as any habitué of Tumblr or Pinterest can attest, is a virally quoted epigram by Anaïs Nin, the 20th century diarist, experimental novelist and erotica author......

There has always been a compelling correspondence between religious ceremony and theatrical performance. Whether it’s the “ritual theory” advanced by Victorian classical scholars that ancient Greek theater developed from Athenian religious drama, or the affinities between lavish Broadway musical spectacle and the pomp and circumstance of, say, a Roman Catholic......