Steven Leigh Morris

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Our 20th Annual Theater Awards Nominees

Photo by Gar CampbellThe 20th annual L.A. Weekly Theater Awards, with Circle X Theater Company, the cast of Naked Boys Singing!, Chris Wells, Karen Finley, Pasadena Shakespeare Company and more, will be held at the Los Angeles Theater Center, 514 S. Spring Street, downtown, on Monday, April 19, beginning at......
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Teenage Crush

Photo by Fred VicarelI'm feeling a bit guilty about my freewheeling potshots at Southern California's best classical rep company, A Noise Within. It may seem strange that my complaint over the years has been largely a function of the troupe's remarkable assemblage of acting and design talent, combined with its......
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Season’s Cretins

D.W. Fairbanks It’s December at the Weekly, and the holiday-themed press releases are almost all in. (Who says L.A. has no seasons?) The ones publicizing theater events inevitably fall into two categories: "family values" and "spit-wad anarchy." Sugar and spice. In the first stack, you’ll find promotions for, you know,......
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Duck Logic

Photo by Ed Krieger Playwright Robert Harders calls his 10th-century Arabian fantasy (premiering at the McCadden Place Theater) The Demented Slave of Love. Meanwhile, over at the Celebration Theater you’ll find the West Coast premiere of Puerto Rican Edwin Sanchez’s contemporary family drama, Clean — a play that could also......

City of Stages

Was it a bad dream, or did I really stand, recently, in an almost empty lobby at the Los Angeles Theater Center — on a Saturday night, no less? This same lobby, as cavernous as Victoria Station, only a few years ago would have been packed at 7:45 with people......
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Shticks and Stones

There's not much a playwright can do with a Nazi anymore. Have a Brown Shirt goose-step across the stage and we get the point, almost too quickly. Like flipping a Chihuahua with a choke chain, there's no ambiguity in the gesture, no wiggle room for the emotional tug and pull......
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Of Lice and Men

In the midst of life, we are in death. -The Book of Common Prayer "Science has discovered . . . a serum that will stop the Swath of Death and save the lives of thousands. Los Angeles calls for help and in less than 36 hours the vials of serum......
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Daughter of the American Revolution

Performance artist Karen Finley has become a kind of battered and bruised Statue of Liberty for the baby boomers, a naked, chocolate-coated figure holding up a flaming yam - a beacon for latter-day huddled masses yearning to breathe free. When she was one of the celebrated NEA Four (with Tim......
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Haggis, Guinness and a Couple of Plays

The Edinburgh International Festival, now 50 years old, is the granddaddy of such events, host to the world's most established music, dance and theater companies. The independently administered Festival Fringe runs simultaneously, as do a Book Festival and the Tattoo, a Scottish military parade with fireworks held nightly at the......

Moscow stares into the abyss

I didn't travel to Moscow to write about the crisis, but rather to be with my wife, Lena, a Russian who is temporarily living and working in Moscow, financially and emotionally helping her family through the travail of her aging father's eerie and metaphoric paralysis. Yet during my 10-day visit,......