What if bygones are never bygones? What happens to a man, betrayed by a friend, who seethes in anger and bitterness for the next 30 years? And what happens to that former friend who has, ostensibly, “put the past behind him,” but has to live with the ineradicable knowledge of that betrayal and the s
What are friends for? “To blow the whistle on you when you’re insane,” according to the playwright. Can you build an entire play around this premise? You can if you’re John Patrick Shanley, whose popular plays and films have won him a Tony, an Oscar and a Pulitzer Prize.
So, color me old-fashioned. I like a well-written play that engages me, that gets me to really care about the characters and what happens to them, and prompts me to think about them afterwards.
A seedy-looking, longhaired Matthew Modine stumbles into his agent’s office looking for a “cause” that will bring him back from obscurity and get him invited to “A-list” parties again.
Morlan Higgins is one of my favorite actors currently working in L.A. theater. I’ve never given him anything but a rave review. And this is another one.
What do Tony Kushner, Larry Kramer and Moises Kaufman have in common? A lot. They are all award-winning contemporary playwrights. They have all been civil rights activists.
A reclusive old man wanders from room to room in a cluttered, old-fashioned apartment that hasn’t been attended to since his wife passed away. The furniture is from another era and the walls and bookcases are filled with tchotchkes accumulated over a long lifetime.
If I were to take a vote right now, I’d have to say that Gordon Bressack’s new play “Fuggedaboudit!” is the worst play I’ve seen this century. But then, of course, the century is new.
So there’s this radio DJ who is running a contest to find the best new musical talent in town. Doo-wop doo-wop doo-wop. Then there’s Denny (the cute one) and his buddy Eugene (the nerd) practicing their moves in Denny’s basement.
Spoiler alert: In Itamar Moses’ brilliant intellectual farce, “Bach at Leipzig,” Bach does not appear. But his music does! Set in 1722, Moses’ witty comedy is based on an actual event: the gathering of eight of the major organists of the time in a competition to succeed the recently deceased organ m
All the ugly racist clichés about African-Americans that used to be tossed around with impunity during World War II are present in Paul Leaf’s new play “Mutiny at Port Chicago,” now having its world premiere at Santa Monica’s Ruskin Theatre.
My maternal grandmother, when she was just 12 years old, was placed in a hay wagon among a group of strangers and was sent from her small village of Mikhaelevka, in the Ukraine, across northern Europe to Hamburg, where she boarded a boat for America.
