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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

A ladylike solution to the irritatingly enjoyable ‘A Feminine Ending’
From the very first sentence of A Feminine Ending at South Coast Repertory, I wanted to sneak behind the lead, Brooke Bloom (last seen as Ophelia in SCR’s magnificent Hamlet), and give her a hard, nasty pinch on the back of the arm, right where it [...]

Don Caballero: Complex instrumentals that have nothing to do with math. Or geometry. Or any other number-related puns. $10. 21+.
ALEX’S BAR 2913 E Anaheim St, Long Beach 90804. 562.434.8292; alexsbar.com.
Tango: Opening night of “Tango” at Cal Rep, about a young man trying to ease his family’s lack of moral structure. 7pm. $15-20.
CAL REP National Guard [...]

Pages: An exhibit ripped literally from the pages of its artists.
UTOPIA 445 E First St, Long Beach 90802. 562.432.6888; utopiarestaurant.net.
Robert Kuttner: An “authoritative voice of liberalism” in conversation with Ariana Huffington. 8pm. Call for details.
BOOK SOUP 8818 Sunset Blvd, West Hollywood 90069. 310.659.3110; booksoup.com.

Long Beach Shakespeare Company deftly de-immortalizes a classic
There are several things disconcerting about the Long Beach Shakespeare Company’s adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon–that Sam Spade smokes Djarum cigarettes; that he wears cuffless pants; that he’s a blond. But none are so difficult to reconcile as the distance between the seminal 1941 film version [...]