The Group Rep kicks off its forty-fifth season with a pair of comedy one-acts by James McLure that are cemented in a particular time and place—the early 1970s in the small dusty town of Maynard, Texas. In Laundry and Bourbon, the Viet Nam War is grinding down, women are wives decades away from the Twenty-first … Continue reading “Laundry and Bourbon” & “Lone Star” at The Group Rep
Once again, the incomparable Antaeus Theatre Company has given theatregoers a brilliant revival of an exquisite play, this time with Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan, which opened in London in1996, and was subsequently produced in New York and Los Angeles in 1998. Set in the small Aran Island community of Inishmaan (Inis Meáin) in … Continue reading “The Cripple of Inishmaan” at Antaeus Theatre Company
After going cold turkey and cutting ourselves off from the habit of cable TV or satellite dish, my other brain and I started to explore all the other possibilities available with an antenna and a few subscriptions like Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime (which we already pay for), and access to our kids’ HBO account. O, … Continue reading “Rod Serling’s Stories from the Zone” at Theatre 40
The term “kitchen sink drama,” meaning the gritty, British, working class plays of the late 1950s and early 1960s, could easily be applied to Taylor Mac’s extraordinary black comedy free-for-all, Hir. The term hir “is a gender-neutral, third-person singular object pronoun that replaces the use of him or her,” which points to the gender-bending confusion … Continue reading “Hir” at Odyssey Theatre Ensemble
In her semi-autobiographical new play, Last Call, television writer Anne Kenney (Switched at Birth, Hellcats, Greek, L.A. Law and, most recently, the first three seasons of Outlander) has crafted a domestic drama situated in drug-addicted Ohio, where the elderly parents of an LA TV writer, Jill (Laura Richardson), are in the final stages of life. … Continue reading “Last Call” at Open Fist Theatre Company
Tracy Letts’s new play, Linda Vista, swept in from Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company where it premiered in April of 2017, sneaks up on an audience in this sterling production under the keen direction of Dexter Bullard. On opening night, the audience filled the Mark Taper Forum to capacity and was cheerfully buzzing along in anticipation. … Continue reading “Linda Vista” at the Mark Taper Forum
Culture Clash, the brilliant Chicano theatre troupe consisting of Richard Montoya, Ricardo Salinas and Herbert Siguenza, has been around a long, long time and shows no sign of letting up. Their current sharp-edged social satire, Culture Clash (Still) in America, now in production at South Coast Rep, is unabashedly and satisfyingly rude as they demolish … Continue reading “Culture Clash (Still) in America” at South Coast Repertory
