Steven Leigh Morris

”Loss of innocence“ is one of those romantic phrases writers and historians love to bandy about as though, in a national context at least, it actually means something. Some say that America lost her innocence during the Civil War; others, at the Rosenbergs‘ trial, the Vietnam War or, according to......

In the late ’80s, on Beverly Boulevard a few blocks east of CBS Television City, stood a relic, the Pan Pacific Auditorium -- a looming, cavernous, boarded-up shell of a former public-entertainment center. To hop the chainlink barricade and crawl through the gaps in the building‘s wooden shutters on any......

With wry hosts Megan Mullally, John Fleck and David Schweizer, and considerable organizational efforts by Robert Berg, Robert A. Prior and the Fabulous Monsters theater troupe, the 22nd annual L.A. Weekly Theater Awards became a multi-ring, interactive environmental circus, with an overflow crowd and the tone of a rave melting......

Perhaps Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize–winning Caltech physicist who died in 1988 — and the subject of the stage homage QED — knew of a mathematical equation that could explain massive exertions of energy that go nowhere, for that’s what’s currently on display at the Mark Taper Forum. Feynman was......

If you remember Caryl Churchill‘s Top Girls, Cloud Nine, Serious Money or Mad Forest, you’ll recall these plays as being about people -- often ice-hearted women -- striving to accrue the same riches and power as the men around them, or tearing at the fabric of such wealth and success......

An early “official” version of the sorriest chapter in Mormon history came from Utah Governor Brigham Young himself, who blamed local Paiute Indian warriors for the September 1857 slaying of 120 all but helpless California-bound emigrants from Arkansas, Missouri, Texas and Ohio. (Seventeen children were spared.) Young‘s interpretive distancing of......

Talk about having greatness thrust upon you . . . English playwright Edward Bond’s second play, Saved, premiered in a private performance at London‘s Royal Court Theatre in 1965, after having been banned from the public stage by the Lord Chamberlain for one gruelingly violent scene. Bond thought he had......

The following shows and/or individuals have been nominated by this newspaper’s theater critics for excellence on stages of 99 seats or less, in productions opening between January 1 and December 31, 2000, in the Los Angeles area. The awards will be presented on Monday night, April 23, 2001, as part......

Art by Bill SmithIn order to assess local theater activity over the past year, the Weekly spoke with three experts in the field who gathered for a recorded conversation over brunch at Marie Callender’s restaurant in Museum Square. Thornton Byle, an avid theater watcher, has written drama criticism for the......

Sometimes I wish every Tommy’s burger joint had a small yard behind the parking lot with a couple of doomed cattle bellowing in the moonlight as the teenagers wait in line for their ground meat on a bun. At least then going to Tommy‘s would involve an authentic, perhaps even......