KCRW's Opening the Curtain

Playwright Neil LaBute likes to get under your skin. Love him or hate him, he's going to push your buttons, challenge your assumptions. City Garage theater is tackling his 2011 play The Break of Noon and it's no exception.

With all the off-stage drama in 99-seat-theater of late, it's been easy to forget the art itself. Trevor written by Nick Jones is the latest 99-seat gem from Circle X. It's as passionate an argument as any for why you should care about LA's small theaters.

Why does small theater in LA matter? Where's the audience rallying to support us? Why should you care? We have to answer those questions not for New York or Chicago or Athens but for Los Angeles. 

The Tough Questions

There's no question that in America, we undervalue the arts.

Why would a union fight its own members?

The drama in LA theater happening off-stage that's swirling around the stage actors' union and what's called the 99-seat Plan and it's untimely, but seemingly unavoidable, demise. And, if you listen to the majority of the LA theater community, the demise of small theater itself.

Anthony Byrnes reviews Four Larks latest "junkyard opera," The Temptation of St. Antony.

Los Angeles theater has to it a bit of feast or famine. Right now there are two shows downtown that are visual feasts with challenging narratives that you shouldn't miss.

The challenge with "Disconnection" is its dramatic engine is built around story rather than action. The characters are included as a means of getting the details out. Trouble is if you've followed any of the writing about Scientology - and who hasn't in LA - it's going to feel like old news.

In one sense, there isn't much there in the Wooster Group's "Early Shaker Spirituals." But there isn't much there in the same way there isn't much to a Shaker chest of drawers.

Matthew Lopez's The Whipping Man begins with a historical fact: there were Jews in the South during the Civil War. What would it be like if those Jews owned slaves and those slaves became observant Jews?

Viral, at the Bootleg Theater,  is one of those plays that in order to talk about it you have to dismantle some of its dramatic engine - or more simply - spoiler alert.

Viral, at the Bootleg Theater, is one of those plays that in order to talk about it you have to dismantle some of its dramatic engine - or more simply - spoiler alert.

Theater for a New Year