Steven Mikulan

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Death Takes a Meeting

Steven Mikulan
The entertainment industry's narcotic dependence upon physical beauty and its denial of mortality have inflicted upon Southern California an obsession with youth, plastic surgery, reincarnation, even cryogenics. Los Angeles provides a unique nexus where beauty, money and death inevitably intersect - sometimes head-on. This potent combination has proven almost as......
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A Doctor Calls

Steven Mikulan
Fifteen years ago Charles Marowitz staged a Los Angeles Actors Theater production of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People in which Gerald Hiken portrayed the drama's crusading protagonist as a self-righteous prig who, in some ways, was more ignorant than the townspeople he presumed to enlighten. It made for......

Night of the Long Knives

Steven Mikulan
It's been 20 years since the release of John Carpenter's Halloween: the film that made us reconsider the American kitchen as something more than the repository of milk and cookies and, instead, as an armory of Ginsu knives. That movie and its clones introduced to mainstream films the now-dominant Red......
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Toner Poem

Steven Mikulan
Firing up a copy machine may not inspire the atavistic awe of harnessing nature that comes from turning on a water tap, but we'd be fools to forget how essential the Xerox and its competitors are to modern existence. Nor should we forget how recent an invention the copier is......
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My Own Private Nuremberg

Steven Mikulan
Guilt, even more than misery, loves company, which may explain why we often lose sight of the separate sources of collective evil. (The old problem of not being able to see the trees for the forest.) Modern Europe's greatest crime had many partners, but rather than try to focus on......
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The Prisoner of El Centro Avenue

Steven Mikulan
Off the stage, Tanner has comfortably embraced the mother he had once wished dead. Sally Tanner, who changed her own name at the same time her son changed his, is now a Muslim, teaching quilting and supervising a halfway house for the mentally ill in the San Francisco Bay Area......
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The Prisoner of El Centro Avenue

Steven Mikulan
It's 8:30 on a warm evening in May 1997, and a reading of Justin Tanner's new comedy, Coyote Woman, has just ended at the Cast Theater. The play, about a young woman who undergoes Jekyll-Hyde transformations after she believes a coyote has bitten her in Griffith Park, is vintage Tanner......
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Mr. Booth Goes to Washington

Steven Mikulan
It might be said that John Wilkes Booth was America's first political actor: Long before Paul Robeson, Jane Fonda and Warren Beatty - or, for that matter, before R.W. Reagan - Booth had carved his name into the national bark through one ideologically driven deed. True, murder is not considered......
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Fetal Positions

Steven Mikulan
THE WATER CHILDREN By WENDY MacLEOD At the MATRIX THEATER 7657 Melrose Ave. Through July 13 House of Yes, Wendy MacLeod's 1990 family satire that impishly combined incest and Kennedy-assassination lore, announced the arrival of a playwright who was smart, funny and more than a little mischievous. (During its local......
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Bet Noir

Steven Mikulan
Gambling, at least as it exists in literature, is not just some juicy existential trope; it's a veritable watermelon of a metaphor. The gambler has long been regarded as a walking system of ethical self-definition, a person living for the moment and only in the present, an homme d'engage who......