Theater makers in L.A. and beyond have become a denigrated, migrant population, behaving in some ways like undocumented laborers. True, they're mostly native-born, pale-skinned, college-educated types, with English being their first language. Nonetheless they are outsiders, searching for a place to call home. The artistry of their work has been......
Andrew Hinderaker’s play is a bit like Death of a Salesman but with snappier dialogue and a titillating backdrop. Matt (Max Lesser) quits his job to take an ethical stand, despite having a newly pregnant wife, Katie (Anna Konkle), waiting at home. Their new idea is a porn company catering......
This year was a noisy and divisive one in local theater, punctuated with threats, real and imagined — from sources allegedly ranging from the IRS to the state's Labor & Workforce Development Agency to the stage actors and stage managers' union (Actors' Equity Association) — to disembowel L.A.'s long-standing 99-Seat......
Rebecca Gilman’s new play, Luna Gale, is about a social worker in Iowa, Caroline (Mary Beth Fisher), who finds herself arbitrating the possession of an infant between young, unmarried, meth-addicted parents (Colin Sphar and Reyna de Courcy) and the tag-team duo of the baby’s evangelical Christian grandmother, Cindy (Jordan Baker),......
We're guided by program notes and advertising materials to believe that Rebecca Gilman's new play, Luna Gale, is primarily about a social worker in Iowa and the morally challenged world of child services where she's employed. There's some reason to believe that Gilman's play, in a world-premiere production by Chicago's......
In its rather earnest way, Andrew Hinderaker's Dirty calls into question how the word "obscene" often applies to pornography but not to, say, mergers and acquisitions. In fact, the play strongly implies that sex is a kind of merger and acquisition, so why not profit from it? To be clear,......
Encuentro 2014, an inspiring, monthlong festival of 18 Latino performances and readings, just closed at Los Angeles Theatre Center downtown and a couple of off-site locations. It could accurately be described as a reactionary event. "Reactionary," however, does not refer to a yearning backward. Rather, in the purest sense of......
A common habit by drama critics is to compare and contrast a new adaptation of an old work with or against that old work, which would seem a reasonable approach. But not in the case of poet-performer-playwright Luis Alfaro. Alfaro’s work, whether the solo autobiographical performance St. Jude, presented last......
David Ives' Tony-nominated 2010 sexual comedy, Venus in Fur, is to eroticism what Yasmina Reza's Art is to painting. Both are beguiling, erudite parlor games that keep fluttering around the issues they purport to investigate. Venus in Fur, now at South Coast Repertory and the basis of Roman Polanski's recent......
For the first time in years, Center Theatre Group is showing glimmers of what a flagship theater is supposed to do — allow the questions posed in one production to correspond to questions posed in another. I'm referring to three concurrent presentations in which CTG had a hand: the now-closed......
