Steven Leigh Morris

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Signifying Nothing

Steven Leigh Morris
How the everlasting cocksucking fuck did David Mamet get to be so lauded a figure in American theater? True, he’s been the subject of a great many interviews and profiles, in the likes of Salon and The New Yorker. And, true, he received a Pulitzer Prize. But so did William......
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Sharp Turns

Steven Leigh Morris
What a difference a day makes. On September 10, we were still living in the 20th century. That illusion ended with the cataclysmic events of September 11, which violently thrust us into the realpolitik of the new millennium. By September 12, while Broadway and off-Broadway understandably shut down for a......
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Western Lit’s Greatest Hits

Steven Leigh Morris
For the past few years, theaters across the country have been peppered with stage versions of books, narrative voice intact, with characters, for example, who say their own lines of dialogue (“You must let me out of the box, Mildred”), then establish a narrative context by referring to themselves in......

High Anxiety

Steven Leigh Morris
In the hallway outside Hollywood High School’s main office, assistant principal Mitzi Kono was slightly prickly in her insistence that the morning‘s traumatic events had little impact upon the day’s schedule, or even upon the mood in the school. ”Students are students,“ said principal Floria Trimble, describing her wards‘ obliviousness......
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Live Inaction Heroes

Steven Leigh Morris
Photo by Rick Pickman “The sound of words makes another dimension,” says Mrs. Feuerstein (Maria O’Brien), obviously speaking for playwright Murray Mednick in Mrs. Feuerstein, his final play of a recent trio. (All three plays — the others are 16 Routines and Joe and Betty — were produced this year......
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Fleas in Their Ears

Steven Leigh Morris
Photo by Gulu Montiero Georges Feydeau’s spirit hangs over Los Angeles — for the time being, at least. That two stagings of his celebrated yet rarely produced French farce, A Flea in Her Ear, should have opened across town on the same night — taking each show’s producer by surprise......
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A Cradle of Nostalgia

Steven Leigh Morris
Photo by Mary Beth Delucia If the Broadway stage is any indication, we really don’t much care for our own era. Maybe we just don’t know what to do with it theatrically, or in other ways as well. The blockbuster stage events coming out of New York seem to be......

Chicken-Hearted

Steven Leigh Morris
There is no garden, only patches of community-owned ivy adjoining the Hollywood condo where I live. But in last summer’s heat, against house rules, I planted Kentucky Wonder pole beans, which climbed from long, narrow containers up a wrought-iron railing and through bird netting attached to hooks on the eaves......
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Birth Trap

Steven Leigh Morris
Among the ”good things“ in Jessica Goldberg‘s new play is an infant just born to a drug-addicted teenage mother named Mary (Karina Logue). She’s married to Dean (Hamish Linklater), an emotionally unhinged ox of a fellow who works somewhere 9 to 5 in order to support wife, child and coke-dependent......