By Ernest Kearney — There is an adage in the creative pursuit of playwriting: “It’s easier to set them up than knock them down.” How this translates, in actuality, is that there exists an awful lot of plays with very strong first acts which then
By Ernest Kearney — As one devoted to the study of history, I knew of Mary Walker (1832–1919), but I confess, only dimly in being aware that she was the only woman ever to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
By Ernest Kearney — In "Jocasta A Motherf**king Tragedy," Brian Weir and the Ghost Road Theatre Company have taken Sophocles’ classic tale of Oedipus and window-dressed it for the “#metoo” movement.
By Ernest Kearney — “DoubleDouble,” playwright Guy Zimmerman reveals in the program notes, “came out of a case I wanted to make for Macbeth being history’s first Angeleno.” Zimmerman attempts to clarify that assertion by hinging the Scottish play to the 1944 classic crime film
By Ernest Kearney — "Desert Rats" by Nate Rufus Edelman is hardly the first play ever written about a kidnapping. It stands in the shadow of "Orphans" by Lyle Kessler, though Edelman’s work is far better written.
By Ernest Kearney — Many found 2018 a rather soft year for theater, and it possibly was. Or perhaps it only seemed so since the past few years Los Angeles has enjoyed an embarrassment of riches in the sterling productions that have graced her stages.
By Ernest Kearney — Before we move into the review of Playwright Andrew Osborne’s "Special" directed by Kerr Seth Lordygan at Theatre of Note, you should know of the inspiration behind this production: the legendary, or infamous, "The Star Wars Holiday Special. "
By Ernest Kearney — This was my first “mashup” of theatre and film with soundtrack framed within a concert rendering. "Love Actually Live" at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts starts off with points for me ahead of the game.
By Ernest Kearney — "Fool for Love" by Sam Shepard, which just closed the Lounge Theatre in Hollywood, is not a tidy play. In fact, as far as theatrical experiences go, it shares many of the same traits as Elizabethan bear-baiting; brutal and violent—with
By Ernest Kearney — The story of Jim Jones has material enough for any ten dramatists. In the production "White Nights, Black Paradise," which closed this past Sunday at the Hudson Theatre, Playwright Sikivu Hutchinson starts with the arrival of two African American sisters.
