Bill Raden

Annie Saunders and Anthony Nikolchev in the immersive The Day Shall Declare It; Credit: Photo by Gema Galiana

Some of 2016's Best Theater Wasn't Found on a Stage

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......
Mikie Beatty as the dejected lover in Annie Lesser's B(arbershop); Credit: Photo by Annie Lesser

An East Hollywood Barber Shop Is the Setting of an Immersive Show About Love Gone Bad

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......
Christian Velky

A New Drama About Beach Boy Dennis Wilson Is No Day at the Beach

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......
Rob Smith

More Proof That Kurt Vonnegut Is One of the Best Cultural Commentators of Our Time

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......
Credit: Cecily Johnson

Best Voyage to the Future of Live Performance

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......
Credit: Keight Leighn

Most Extreme Audience Immersion

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......
Vocalist Marisa Matthews as the much maligned author Anaïs Nin in Anaïs: A Dance Opera; Credit: Barry Weiss

Has Anaïs Nin Reclaimed Her Status as a Feminist Icon?

“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......