LITTLE WOMEN [a multicultural transposition]

If Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March had come of age in post-WWII L.A. as the Mayeda sisters, offspring of a Japanese-American father and a Chinese-American mother, Louisa Mae Alcott’s classic novel might look and sound just like Little Women [a multicultural transposition], Velina Hasu Houston’s unabashedly G-rated World Premiere rewrite that had me in its spell from ebullient start to heartwarming finish.
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THIS LAND

At once epic and intimate, Evangeline Ordaz’s This Land weaves two centuries of Watts history—from the Mexican ranchers who seized Tongva Indian land in the 1880s, to the white homeowners who took flight in the 1950s when blacks moved in, to the Latinos who became the majority four decades later, to today’s white gentrifiers—into two absorbing, illuminating hours of Los Angeles theater at its best.
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SINNER’S LAUNDRY

No playwright could ask for a better cast or finer production design than IAMA Theatre Company has given John Lavelle’s Sinner’s Laundry. Audiences, on the other hand, may find themselves leaving the Lounge Theatre clueless to the message, meaning, or simple raison d’être of Lavelle’s World Premiere absurdist existentialist comedy. I certainly did.
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REDLINE

A decades-estranged father and son meet for the first time since a car crash ripped their family to shreds in Christian Durso’s gripping, emotionally-charged Redline, an IAMA Theatre Company World Premiere that held me in its grip from the bombshell revelation that sets it in motion to its life-and-death final seconds.
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RUNAWAY HOME

A fourteen-year-old far too smart, self-assured, and resourceful for her own good takes to the streets of New Orleans three years after Hurricane Katrina lay waste to the city’s Lower Ninth Ward in Jeremy J. Kamps’ Runaway Home, a Fountain Theatre World Premiere that proves every bit as compelling a slice-of-post-Katrina-life as it is a bona fide crowd-pleaser.
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STUPID KID

Folks are dumb where Chick Ford comes from, which is why you may be excused for assuming at first that Sharr White’s Stupid Kid has nothing but poor white trash jokes in store for audiences at The Road On Magnolia. But think again. Chick and his kinfolk are about to reveal far more about the Eastern Colorado Fords than initially meets the eye.
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WALKING TO BUCHENWALD

An intergenerational trek across Europe turns a good deal darker than the lighthearted family road trip it initially promises to be in the Open Fist Theatre Company’s World Premiere Walking To Buchenwald, the funny, impactful latest from the endlessly self-reinventing Tom Jacobson.
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FIXED

A sexually confused Filipino-American “ladyboy,” the drag princess’s sexually confused Mexican-American sort-of boyfriend, and the sort-of boyfriend’s just plain confused sort-of girlfriend, all three of them in massive states of denial, play out a centuries-old game of love and death in contemporary L.A. in Boni B. Alvarez’s Fixed, a Filipino-Latino telenovela come deliciously to life on the Atwater Village Echo Theater stage.
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