Evan Henerson is a longtime arts and features writer who lives in Southern California. He is the former theater critic for the Los Angeles Daily News and has written for such publications as American Theatre, Playbill Online, Stage Directions and Backstage.
hot through with equal parts rancor and compassion, Jess McLeod’s production of this, IAMA’s first commissioned play, is effective despite some narrative speedbumps.
Director Michael Michetti has put thought and heart into his production and peopled it with a strong cast whose characters opt for playing the strength of their convictions over histrionics.
Visually and acoustically, from performances to pacing, this DREAM directed by Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and Geoff Elliott is so beautifully thought out and rendered that the Noise Within brain-trust should consider filming it for posterity.
By its very title, BISEXUAL SADNESS plays and feels like it should be the topic of a seminar or an article in a clinical journal, maybe even the theme of a discussion group.
A co-production with East West Players, Ulloa’s play makes the case for deeper investigation and against the kind of snap judgments that its hero, Chino, endures and fuels.
Two of Smith’s previous plays have been mounted at the Solana Beach company, and the company commissioned Smith to create a new work to kick off NCR’s 42nd season.
when you’ve got a guy like Adam Rapp writing a cerebral two-handed dance between a Yale creative writing professor and her enigmatic new student, and you pepper it with scribes ranging from Dostoevsky to Anne Tyler, and you give the whole shebang to the Pasadena Playhouse and cast Amy Brenneman
A mother-daughter tale that traffics in regrets, dreams deferred, selfishness and the value of all lives human and animal, KILL SHELTER barely elevates the contrivances of its plotting.
From the opening storm to the closing musical number, the Kiki & David Gindler Performing Arts Center is awash in buzzes, cries, whooshes, rattles and clangs.
As creatively at home as Anna Deavere Smith has been delving into multiple perspectives on the Crown Heights riots of 1991 and the fallout from the Rodney King verdicts of 1992, a traditionally-structured play – even one about a figure as arresting as Billie Jean King - may not be in her artistic