BEHIND THE GATES
Sunday, May 23rd, 2010RECOMMENDED
Bethany Lieberman’s adoptive parents are at their wits’ end. The privileged seventeen-year-old has turned to sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll to the point that she now sees Mom and Dad as the devil incarnate. Fearing that their child, born to a crack-addicted mother, may possibly be beyond saving, Susan and Jerry Lieberman ship Bethany off to Israel, kicking and screaming.
What the Liebermans are hoping for is a miracle. What they get is the same kind of nightmare Sally Field faced in Not Without My Daughter.
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MADAGASCAR
Saturday, May 22nd, 2010
A young man disappears, and five years later remains missing with nary a clue of his possible whereabouts.
JT Rogers’ Madagascar looks at the effect of this disappearance on three of the people closest to him. Densely written, told almost entirely through monologs, Madagascar is a smart play that requires smarts from its audience.
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THE ICE-BREAKER
Sunday, May 16th, 2010RECOMMENDED
Global warming is both a matter of scientific concern and a metaphor for Sonia and Lawrence’s relationship in David Rambo’s The Ice-Breaker, now playing at Beverly Hills’ Theatre 40. Though ultimately too talky to hold this reviewer’s attention as much as I would have liked, the production is distinguished by fine acting, direction, and design.
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LONDON’S SCARS
Saturday, May 15th, 2010
Two scarred Londoners take center stage in award-winning playwright Richard Martin Hirsch’s latest, the current-as-today’s-headlines London’s Scars, now in its World Premiere engagement as a guest production at West L.A.’s Odyssey Theatre.
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EDWARD II
Friday, May 14th, 2010
Who would have thought that a play written well over four hundred years ago by a contemporary of William Shakespeare would be in-your-face gay enough to make it an appropriate choice for an LGBT theater season?
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THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WAY
Sunday, May 9th, 2010
Here’s a question for all you history buffs out there. What two 20th Century inventions revolutionized gay men’s search for quick, anonymous sex with other men?
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COPENHAGEN
Friday, May 7th, 2010
There’s a moment early on in Michael Frayn’s Tony Award-winning Copenhagen when Margrethe Bohr says reassuringly to her physicist husband Niels, “I don’t think anyone has yet discovered a way you can use theoretical physics to kill people.” Ironic words indeed when spoken to one of the theoretical physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project developing the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, weapons which led to the immediate or eventual deaths of 200,000 human beings.
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THE GIFT HORSE
Monday, May 3rd, 2010
Lydia R. Diamond’s Stick Fly was one of the biggest critical successes of last year’s theater season, scoring nominations and/or wins at L.A.’s Big Three award ceremonies—the Ovations, the LADCCs, and the LA Weeklys.
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Since 2007, Steven Stanley's StageSceneLA.com has spotlighted the best in Southern California theater via reviews, interviews, and its annual StageSceneLA Scenies.
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