Steven Leigh Morris

"I am big. It's the pictures that got small," Norma Desmond says in Sunset Boulevard. There's a discernible condescension in a number of reviews of Rajiv Joseph's 2011 play, Gruesome Playground Injuries, in its early productions. Mainly these reviews keep comparing it to Joseph's "bigger" play, Bengal Tiger at the......

Pointless killings lie at the heart of playwright Brett Neveu's world. Through senseless murders, the author grasps for the purpose of life in an indifferent world. Perhaps without even meaning to, his latest play grapples with a fundamental shift in the way Americans see themselves. Through the construct of the......

In terms of international stature and influence, Paul Robeson, who died in 1976, was the most direct antecedent — politically, philosophically and even in the way he conduced his personal life — to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Both men linked the tenets of their Christianity to progressive causes; the......

When you've got a reclusive Hassidic kid in 1950s New York City who speaks, often annoyingly, through his sketches and paintings, you've got a provocative clash of cultural assimilation and artistic expression. Aaron Posner's stage adaptation of Chaim Potok's novel My Name Is Asher Lev brings an absorbing, retrospective story......

On a Sunday afternoon in March, one lean and one muscular actor — Donal Thoms-Cappello and Chris L. McKenna, respectively — are in rehearsal for Benjamin Brand's new play, Taste. They're doing stretching exercises on the bare stage of Sacred Fools Theater Company in East Hollywood, where the play is......

Blending techniques of New York's Wooster Group and Sheffield, England's Forced Entertainment, L.A.'s own Poor Dog Group's performance piece, under Jesse Bonnell's well-pitched direction, poses a timeless conundrum. Efren Delgadillo Jr.'s set includes pairings - of mirrors, screens, video monitors - inviting us to see the world through sundry reflections......