Opening the Curtain

With the 50th anniversary of the Watts Riots, the first anniversary of Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, the murders in South Carolina, the seemingly endless, and senseless, litany of unarmed black men dying at the hands of white police -- with all of this -- it's hard to imagine a more timely subject for the theater to tackle than American racism.

The latest production at the Mark Taper Forum, Bent is a 'Taper play,' one connected to our moment and urged, if only implicitly, towards inclusion and social justice. 

Think about home: the home of childhood. The home where you grew up. The home where your mother was. The home you had to leave.  This summer there are a trio of plays in Los Angeles that you shouldn't miss that are all set there - in that distant and complicated place called home.

This is one of those plays that’ll stick with you, in part because, true to Rogue Machine's reputation, the acting is wonderful, the casting spot on. It’s the decisions that’ll shake you and leave you with profound questions: why are we here? What makes life meaningful? It's one of those plays that's an argument for the theater: that allows us to tackle these dilemmas together as a community. What could be better?

At its core, The False Servant is a Commedia-inspired, biting romantic comedy with a cross-dresser as a catalyst.

A comedy about Jewish heritage and values which, on its surface the question is "what does it mean to be a Jew?" More broadly, it's a legacy play. 

Have you ever been trapped by a Midwestern summer, where the stale heat seems to stop time, the limitless sky is only juxtaposed by the prison of your space and the confines of expectation? Where the air stifles you with an electric desperation. It's that air that the Antaeus Theatre Company captures in William Inge's Picnic.

For the sixth year, the Hollywood Fringe Festival has taken over Hollywood with over 250 scrappy, boot-strap shows across three weeks -- and perhaps most compelling are the shows that wouldn't exist outside of the Fringe context and take LA's intimate theater to its logical extreme...

Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, currently being revived by Pacific Resident Theater, is frightening, funny, profound, and most importantly does honor to Pinter's "muscular" language. If you love Pinter, or just really good drama, don't miss this one.

The Royal Shakespeare Company has adapted Raoul Dahl's Matilda into a  delightful musical and, now, after stopping in New York to pick up some Tony Awards, it's at the Ahmanson Theatre.