Steven Leigh Morris

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Man Without a Country

Steven Leigh Morris
Photo by Craig Schwartz WORKING IN A POLITICALLY OPPRESSIVE PLACE IS A great career move for a writer, though the oppression needs to be really, really unfair and untenable. (Without that commonly held understanding, any expression of conscience might be mistaken for whining.) Think of countries cursed by headline-making social......
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Don’t Look Back

Steven Leigh Morris
Photo by Christina Radish WAITING FOR BETTY FRIEDAN, ANN MARCUS' FREEwheeling adaptation of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, holds a certain fascination in how it reflects on the playwright, her world and her motives of creation. For Marcus is an Emmy Award­winning octogenarian, a female pioneer in television who co-created Mary Hartman,......
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Steamy, Steamy Night

Steven Leigh Morris
Photos by Ted Soqui A FULL HOUSE COMBINED WITH A BARELY FUNCTIONING AIR-conditioning system at Los Angeles Theater Center's Tom Bradley Theater made the 23rd annual Lawees a toasty occasion, and an inordinate endurance test for aerialist Montana Miller, who remained precariously suspended above the stage throughout the evening. Still,......

Introduction

Steven Leigh Morris
LOS ANGELES THEATER'S RICH HISTORY -- DATING BACK TO 1870s vaudeville in El Pueblo -- is often ignored or forgotten, and frequently disparaged based on long-standing clichés about low standards and artists using the stage to showcase themselves for film and TV. But these are half-truths. Belying the stereotypes is......

Jessica Kubzansky and Her Love Affair

Steven Leigh Morris
It took over a month to get together with Jessica Kubzansky. Between commitments for directing plays in all corners of the country and attending her ailing father in Boston, Kubzansky had a window of about 48 hours in Los Angeles. Though she does actually have a local address, the message......

Tony Plana, Beyond Borders

Steven Leigh Morris
Photo by Anne Fishbein "DRIVE IT! I WANT YOU TO GRAB THOSE CHILDREN BY the jugular, so they don't know what hit them!" With his youthful build, cropped salt-and-pepper hair, and pocked face, Tony Plana leans forward in his chair, palms locked onto the surface of the table in front......

Martha Demson, Feeling Game

Steven Leigh Morris
It was perhaps unfair to put an interview subject through such a test, but Martha Demson, artistic director of Hollywood‘s Open Fist Theater, agreed to speak with me in a Griffith Park canyon, in the company of my two domesticated chickens. (The fowl, who normally live in a large cage,......
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Yankee Diddle

Steven Leigh Morris
Photo by Jason Adams IN BRIAN COUSINS' FIRST PLAY, A DRAMA IN 33 SCENES titled And Still the Dogs, an unnamed American businessman arrives in an unnamed Eastern European country. You may wonder why his name isn't Chuck or Dick, or something more specific than The Man. All the other......
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Circle Jerks

Steven Leigh Morris
Photo by Ed Krieger IF WE'RE TO BELIEVE ARTHUR MILLER, MAGGIE, IN HIS play After the Fall, is not modeled on Miller's late wife Marilyn Monroe; nor should the strained marriage of the drama's goal-oriented lawyer and his intuitive, suicidal wife be mistaken for Miller's own private hell living with......

Sleepless in New York

Steven Leigh Morris
A nip in the air flushes the cheeks of the men hauling equipment through the outdoor atrium shared by three Broadway theaters. I’m led up a flight of creaky wooden steps into the warmth of a hallway in one of them, the Golden. At the landing, turning back, I see......