Jenny Lower

The Vortex, Noel Coward’s first hit, blends the playwright’s signature fizzy banter with a dark undercurrent that garnered plenty of attention when the play first debuted in London in 1924. The version currently playing at the Matrix Theatre, a remount of the Malibu Playhouse’s production from earlier this year, fittingly......

Stop Kiss, Diana Son’s 1998 play about two women who are brutally attacked when they’re caught kissing in the early morning in New York’s West Village, is edgier than the Pasadena Playhouse’s usual fare, though not as radical or controversial as the program notes suggest — at least, one hopes......

Some plays simmer, and others scorch. Originally penned by Alice Childress in 1966 but unproduced until 1972, Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black & White is decidedly the latter. This rarely produced revival delivers a blistering indictment of the South’s anti-miscegenation laws against the backdrop of a deeply moving......

The Visceral Theater Company’s production of The Call of Cthulhu, an echo of last year’s highly acclaimed H.P. Lovecraft compendium Lovecraft: Nightmare Suite, brings another of the early 20th century horror writer’s works to the stage in a nimble one-man production directed by Dan Spurgeon. Adapted by and starring Frank......

The farcical, satiric The Why is less a sociological post-mortem of why American high school students resort to mass shootings than a sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes somber catalogue of all the reasons why not: not video games, not shoot-em-up thrillers, not Marilyn Manson, not bullying by the popular kids, not insufficient......

More Louisa May than Lena, the affectionate send-up Women recasts Alcott’s Civil War–era novel of feminine blossoming (as told by Gillian Armstrong's unapologetically saccharine '90s film version, starring Winona Ryder) in the self-conscious, rapid-fire but impeccably articulated chatter of HBO’s Girls. Written by Chiara Atik and directed by Stephanie Ward,......

Few issues these days instigate as much impassioned and ideologically entrenched debate as gun violence and control. In One in the Chamber, a new one act written and directed by Marja-Lewis Ryan, the volume drops to the pitch of a single busy household encountering a stranger. The play examines, with Aristotelian......

Like most of the famed comedy troupe's shows, the content of Truth or Groundlings has almost zero to do with the sleepover game its title riffs on — and that's okay. Are there humiliations galore? Yes. Cringe-worthy revelations? You bet. Hilarity that will stay etched in your brain for the next......

Though Ira Glass has had numerous solo shows throughout the years and has taken his radio hour This American Life into theaters twice, his latest live performance may not seem an obvious choice to his fans. Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host, in which Glass stars along with dancers......