TO THE BONE
Sunday, October 9th, 2022
Pay no mind to its frustratingly cryptic and even off-putting title. Catherine Butterfield’s alternately sidesplitting/heartstrings-tugging To The Bone is not only one of the year’s best new plays, like David Lindsay-Abaire’s similarly set Good People, the Open Fist Theatre Company World Premiere will keep you guessing—and keep surprising you—from its hilarious start to its unexpected, laughter-through-tears finish.
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REVENGE PORN OR THE STORY OF A BODY
Saturday, October 1st, 2022
A disgruntled ex gets back at his onetime bed partner in the most publicly demeaning of ways by posting online the nude selfies she’d sent him years earlier in Carla Ching’s Revenge Porn or The Story of a Body, the thrillingly hot-button latest from Ammunition Theatre Company.
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BABE
Monday, September 26th, 2022Cliffhangers are perfectly fine if you’re writing a series pilot or season finale. Not so much if you’ve written what purports to be a full-length play, which is why, engaged as I was throughout Echo Theater Company’s Babe, I left feeling frustrated, angry, and confused as to why playwright Jessica Goldberg didn’t finish what she’d started so provocatively sixty-five minutes earlier in a more satisfyingly conclusive way.
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BEARINGS
Saturday, September 10th, 2022Is it real or is are we in The Twilight Zone? One thing is for certain. Matt Chait’s Bearings will keep you on the edge of your seat for eighty-five entertaining minutes at Hollywood’s Flight Theatre.
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NORMAL NOISES
Saturday, August 27th, 2022
If laughter is indeed the best medicine, then you’re bound to leave Normal Noises, Clara Rodriguez’s quirky sextet of “plays about real life, only more so” in the halest of health.
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LAVENDER MEN
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2022
Queer playwright Roger Q. Mason explores the love that dared not speak its name between Abraham Lincoln and his “close friend” Elmer Ellsworth in Lavender Men, at once a gay American history fantasia, a very public therapy session for its self-described “black, fat, femme” author, and one of the most stunning productions in town.
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TROUBLE THE WATER
Monday, August 22nd, 2022
Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum pays tribute to a little-known figure in African-American history in Ellen Geer’s illuminating, emotion-packed biodrama Trouble The Water, freely adapted from Rebecca Dwight Bruff’s award-winning 2019 novel of the same name.
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MUD
Monday, August 22nd, 2022Loft Ensemble imagines a dystopian future populated by ten nameless, genderless global calamity survivors in Mud, a World Premiere drama I found alternately pretentious and preachy
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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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