Steven Mikulan

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You've Got Hate Mail

Steven Mikulan
I can't speak for my colleagues, but for me 1998 was a year filled with tedious melodrama, warmed-over camp and unfulfilled promises. And then there was the theater season. While not exactly an annus horribilis, 1998 bore an uncanny (and suspicious) resemblance to 1997, and this very familiarity made it......
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Day of a Locust

Steven Mikulan
Henry DiRoccoBut Not for Me, making its planetary premiere at South Coast Repertory, is Keith Reddin’s eavesdrop on the antagonists of California’s 1950 Senate race, Richard Nixon and Helen Gahagan Douglas. The play disappoints, mostly because it unfolds during two brief, if talky, scenes in which the candidates never cross......
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The Kid From Brooklyn

Steven Mikulan
Peter J. Nieves got a lot of admiring comments around the Weekly when his expressionist play The Toilet opened at the Complex this past February. It was enigmatic, daring - and so unlike most of what we see at that venue. Still, one question nagged: Were Nieves and his play......
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Buried Children

Steven Mikulan
"What happened was this: . . ." These words begin many a scene in Texarkana Waltz, Louis Broome's charming, disarming play about family violence and regional attitude, presented by Circle X Theater Company at the Los Angeles Playhouse. You couldn't demand a more straightforward annunciation, although perhaps you could ask......
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Nobel Savage

Steven Mikulan
Somewhere in Mark Medoff's new play, Gila, a character mentions that a million chimpanzees were killed in laboratories during the search for a polio vaccine, and wonders if the sacrifice was worth it. It's a question that confers a strange sort of recognition upon theater, acknowledging that not only is......
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The Body Politic

Steven Mikulan
Let's face it, most Americans would have been mortified to learn that their president had had a bowel movement in the White House, let alone extramarital sex there. Furthermore, were there a legal loophole available for doing so, Washington's professional Clinton-haters would pursue his prosecution for such an offense. And,......

Spying on Justice

Steven Mikulan
"Excuse me, but how do you spell deceased?" I don’t often get asked this by strangers in a public place, but then, Room 1050 of L.A. County General Hospital is not just any public place. It is the institution’s Ambulatory Emergency Room and one in which the word deceased gets......

Hop Dreams

Steven Mikulan
The rarefied world of the drug addict, like that of the thief, gambler or wartime soldier, is a professional existence whose peculiar realities Hollywood can only pantomime. Based on Jerry Stahl's to-hell-and-back memoir of the same title, Permanent Midnight follows a young TV writer's terrified flight from self-discovery into the......
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Eddie the Confessor

Steven Mikulan
A pudgy, big-eyed comedian with a wayward mouth glides onto the stage, looking for all the world like a younger Ozzy Osbourne, although what really catches our attention is the frosted hair, blue eyeliner and red nail polish, worn along with a woman's Chinese silk tunic and black PVC pants......
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The Disquieting

Steven Mikulan
Christopher Titus comes off as one scary guy. From the moment he appears in Norman Rockwell Is Bleeding, his features made thick and primitive by overcast lighting, we know we're not in for an evening of gentle kvetching delivered by one of those coquettishly neurotic standups who rule American comedy......