As much a searing drama as a vocal concert, Lanie Robertson’s Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill is the story of Billie Holiday’s life, a life filled with the joy of music and the pain of living in a segregated society that scorned and punished black people for the sin of their very existence. … Continue reading “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill”at International City Theatre
It has been a brilliant six months for female playwrights and actors in Greater Los Angeles. Fine productions featuring terrific scripts and great roles for women abound. Ones that come immediately to mind are Rapture, Blister Burn, Burn, The How and the Why, and The Ithaca Ladies Read Medea, all at the industrious Little Fish … Continue reading “Waiting for Grace” at Odyssey Theatre
Mariela Salvatierra (Rachel Gonzalez), a stoic beauty, wears a mask of patience as she sponges down her much older husband, Jose, who is in the last stages of the diabetes that both know will kill him. Jose (Vance Valencia) is cranky and short with her, whining and complaining of pain and discomfort. It is clear … Continue reading “Mariela in the Desert” at Casa 0101
It is always with anticipation that I look forward to a new staging of a play by Eugene O’Neill, especially one that is announced as “rarely produced.” A Touch of the Poet, written in 1943, was, according to Wikipedia, part of a projected cycle of eleven plays that would chronicle an American family starting in … Continue reading “A Touch of the Poet” at Pacific Residence Theatre
Set in the humble living room of a lower middle class home somewhere in Texas, Deb Hiett’s new play, The Super Variety Match Bonus Round!, is a seventy-five minute wonder. A retired couple, Ernest “Erns” Eagleton (Mark L. Taylor) and his wife Mags (Bonnie Bailey-Reed), lead a cramped life bound up by grief over their … Continue reading “The Super Variety Match Bonus Round!” at Rogue Machine Theatre
Leslie Caveny is a woman of accomplishment. A writer and performer, Ms. Caveny has written for film and television—NewsRadio, Mad About You and Everybody Loves Raymond, for which she won an Emmy as co-executive producer. She is also a successful, talented playwright. Her latest work, One Woman Gone Wrong, ostensibly an autobiographical one-woman show, showcases … Continue reading “One Woman Gone Wrong” at Theatre West
In Wendy Graf’s new play, Please Don’t Ask About Becket, fraternal twins, Becket (Hunter Garner) and Emily (Rachel Seiferth)—best friends, tight as ticks, each the other’s half—inevitably grow apart as they mature into teenage, young adult and beyond. Becket is handsome, smart and gifted. He loves music, can play a guitar and sing and compose. … Continue reading “Please Don’t Ask About Becket” at Sacred Fools Theater Black Box
There is no pigeonhole into which one could easily slot Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk’s play, The Suitcase, and then dust one’s hands and say, “There.” Dark comedy? Surely, there is humor; at the end, it brings the house down. It is not a musical although there is song and dance. Political? Historical? Those elements are present as … Continue reading “The Suitcase” at The Echo Theater Company
The horror of war and its cost to the psyche of the soldiers who fight are brought vividly home in Ellen McLaughlin’s Ajax in Iraq. In parallel, overlapping and often synchronous story lines, the play shifts back and forth between the Trojan War and the War in Iraq. The show begins with the towering figure … Continue reading “Ajax in Iraq” at Greenway Court Theatre
Erik Patterson’s intense, outrageous and profane One of the Nice Ones, currently in production at Echo Theater Company, is black comedy at its very best. This ninety-minute, high-speed romp has so much going on that could offend the overly sensitive, that it is hard to know where to start. Blunt, crude sexual language, tightly coiled, … Continue reading “One of the Nice Ones” at Echo Theater Company
Paul Myrvold's Theatre Notes 