Lovell Estell III

What would you do for a hefty slice of $5 million? Some answers come along with laughs in this dark comedy by Jon Polito and Darryl Armbruster. At an all-night Big Apple diner (masterfully designed by Danny Cistone), Dame Fortune smiles when one of the oddball regulars (Alan Ehrlich) gleefully......

That Los Angeles now is considered the homeless capital of the United States makes the West Coast premiere of Irish playwright Pat Kinevane's one-man show all the more apt. His flair for speaking on behalf of society's throwaways was showcased in the Odyssey Theatre's 2011 production of Forgotten, about geriatrics......

Phillip Yordan originally wrote this play for a Polish family, but its blunt theme of liberated female sexuality was deemed unsuitable for the white public, so it debuted in 1944 with a black cast. It has since become something of a staple in the African-American theater canon ( it was......

Even after 60 years and counting, Eugene Ionesco's classic absurdist farce The Bald Soprano is still one of France's most popular and frequently produced plays. And as director Frederique Michel demonstrates in this steadfastly enjoyable revival, it's still good for a load of laughs. The opening tableau reveals a middle-aged......

This is the final installment of Evelina Fernandez's epic trilogy chronicling the Mexican-American immigrant experience. A World War II Arizona mining town is home to Esperanza (Lucy Rodriguez), Silvestre (Sal Lopez) and their daughters, Faith (Esperanza America), Charity (Alexis de la Rocha) and Elena (Olivia Delgado). The girls are a......

Imagine a home where live snakes, spontaneous ballet dancing, fireworks explosions and occasional xylophone playing are ho-hum affairs, and you'll have an idea of the unhinged eccentrics in this delightful production of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's 70-year-old Depression-era comedy You Can't Take It With You. The Sycamore household......

There were a handful of other Elizabethan dramas written about Julius Caesar, but Shakespeare's offers a more entertaining dramatization of Rome's political climate (which was as nasty and cutthroat as our own) and the aftermath of the emperor's murder. Principal among the assassins are Brutus (Jack Stehlin) and Cassius (Tom......

Love, aging and death contour Henry Murray's multilayered play Three Views of the Same Object. Academic professionals Poppy and Jesse (Allan Miller and Anne Gee Byrd) have had a long, fruitful marriage but now are in the waning stages of life. He is suffering from terminal cancer, while booze and......

On balance, director Karen Maruyama and the Groundlings' Sunday Company comics do a solid job of mining these 20-plus sketch routines for laughs. That's not to say that all of the material here is good; there are a handful of instances where the writing lacks the imaginative kick to be......