Steven Leigh Morris

Photo by Neil France WE'VE COME A LONG WAY SINCE CABARET AND The Sound of Music. Remember when the sight of a Nazi Brown Shirt on a stage or screen would elicit dual titillations of disgust and indignation? The Nazis — make that the entire German population — were some......

Our theater veterans like to remark that they haven’t seen anything quite like the global spontaneous combustion of the Lysistrata Project since the Vietnam-era protests, though in truth the scale and swiftness of this theatrical movement has no antecedent. On March 3, Aristophanes’ ancient Greek anti-war comedy, Lysistrata, will be......

Photo by Craig Schwartz AFTER WATCHING LISA LOOMER'S NEW COMEDY, Living Out (at the Taper), about nannies and their Westside employers, I found myself wishing that the author, or director Bill Rauch, was angrier, and that the play was responding to the political and social realities of 2003 rather than......

MOSCOW — A SURE SIGN OF THE times comes with the sight of Moscow's grand old Theater Estrada in a snowfall. As you cross the Old Stone Bridge, trying to avoid the crash-and-burn from black ice underfoot, you'll see barges tied to docks along the frozen Moscow River beneath you,......

Though it’s not supposed to, writer-director James Still‘s play raises troubling questions about what we know, or think we know, about the past, even when we have records and research and witnesses to history. Take Alonzo Fields, for instance, an African-American who was on the White House’s domestic staff from......

Alright, two cheers: One for the Mark Taper Forum finally putting a local stage troupe (Deaf West Theater) in one of its regular mainstage slots. And one for Deaf West Theater, comprised largely of hearing-impaired actors, pulling off its second Broadway musical in three years. The company staged Oliver! in......

Photo by Craig Schwartz ANTON CHEKHOV WAS AMONG THE THEATER'S earliest ecologists. Two of his major works use trees and their disappearance from rural Russia at the turn of the 20th century as a central motif. Uncle Vanya -- a variant on the playwright's earlier work, The Wood Demon --......

Photo by Dennis J. Kent "MANUSCRIPTS DON'T BURN" IS PROBABLY the most famous line from Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov's now famous and once famously censored 1939 novel, The Master and Margarita. The Master is a Faustian love story by and about (among many other things) a financially impoverished novelist silenced......

Photo by Ben van Duin IN 1933, A CHILDLIKE BRICKLAYER FROM LEIDEN, HOLLAND, decides to walk to China. That being too far, he settles for Germany, where he finds unemployment and misery en masse. Dreaming of and agitating for a society that is equal for all, he is eventually sentenced......