At play in the field of the seminar
It would be misleading to call Hello: My Name Is a play. Instead, this night out at the Garage Theatre is a quasi-metafictional farce of a seminar entitled C.O.M.M.U.N.I.C.A.T.I.O.N. (Communication Opportunities Made Meaningful Using New Intellectual Capabilities Already Twined Inside Our Noggins), hosted by Mike Ollenhertz, a self-proclaimed [...]

Alive Theatre’s ‘Lucia Mad’
If you’re turned off by the fictionalization of historical events, if you were a young artist when you first read James Joyce (and understood Finnegans Wake), and if you consider Samuel Beckett a kind of role model, consider Lucia Mad, Don Nigro’s play about Joyce’s disturbed daughter and her unrequited love of [...]

Todd Cunningham’s ‘The Good Hours’ examines life’s difficult questions
Playwright Todd Cunningham’s first effort, The Good Hours, about his relationship with a former fiancée who died tragically, bears an apt tagline: “Just when you think you’ve got love right, everything goes wrong.” It’s a metaphor for this production, which has good bones and is entertaining, but [...]

Tom Jacobson’s ‘Bunbury’ tries rewriting the classics
Playwright Tom Jacobson’s Bunbury, on now at Long Beach Playhouse’s Studio Theatre, is a tantalizing “What if . . . ?”—asking a question that it wisely never quite answers.
This being a play, it takes a while before we finally hear it, from the title character (an admirably overwrought Stephen [...]

Two storied playwrights and a relative newcomer make for must-see theatricality

“BRITANNICUS” by KEITH IAN POLAKOFF
Considering that across-town theaters are staging plays by Nobel literature laureates and pillars of European drama, it’s got be a bit humbling for Tom Jacobson to see his name in lights on Long Beach Playhouse’s marquee.
But while Harold Pinter and Jean [...]

It’s good, but we’ve had ‘What They Have’ before

PHOTO by HENRY DIROCCO
If you loved HBO’s Six Feet Under, you’ll wish that What They Have was about a dysfunctional family that runs a quirky suburban funeral parlor. This new play by Kate Robin (one of the writers of the late cable-TV series) has everything that made [...]

‘Women of Troy’ is a painful lesson on casualties of war

PHOTO by KEITH IAN POLAKOFF
Women of Troy opens on a meeting between gods, Poseidon (Juan Carlos Parada) and Athena (Ivana Karapandzic) considering a just-wrapped 10-year war (victorious Greeks on one side, Trojans on the other) and, here comes the sort of interesting twist for Team [...]

Don’t rock the boat, baby

I was prepared for “modern rock songs.” I was ready for “dance with urban elegance.” I was even up for “relevant sketch comedy.” And when the bright and shiny kids, all dolled up in their Liza lashes and Joel Grey bowties, opened the cruise-boat cabaret show with a perky, multipart harmony [...]

But on a certain level, Culture Clash will always be three dudes from East L.A.

PHOTO by HENRY DIROCCO
It’s a month before their month-long residency at South Coast Repertory, and the three men of Culture Clash haven’t done their homework.
“Who’ve you talked to so far?” we ask them one morning, as they claim they spend months [...]

(Because the lady gets the chair!)
Machinal is the story of a murderess.
It is not a sexy, song-and-dance-filled story of a murderess. Renee Zellweger will not appear to surprise us with good acting and a terrific little cha cha cha. (Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Roxie Hart!) Nor is our murderess a vamp, a la Hedda Gabler, [...]