Lyle Zimskind

ZJU's new production, "Nightmares," begins with one of the company's patented moments of total darkness and sustains it while what starts out as the sound of a normal human gasp escalates and escalates until it fills the room with what might be terror or might be excitement, something sinister or something exhilarating.

Though immature humor has arguably assumed a slicker commercial veneer in our present Apatow-dominated era, and the original National Lampoon magazine is already 15 years out of business, it can still be fun occasionally to subject yourself to some old-school unregenerate comedy that's just downright inappropriate. And the new "Sketches From the National Lampoon" revue certainly fits that bill.

Danai Gurira's "The Convert," which opened last week at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, is old-fashioned high drama for a very contemporary audience. Set in late 19th century colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), the play depicts a cultural and ultimately violent tension between traditional and assimilationist African communities.

Laboratories of Our Youth" is an ambitious attempt to craft a sophisticatedly silly contemporary farce with period trappings, but the final product ends up rather less than the sum of its parts.

If you can see how this pathetic little human condition of ours is also pretty funny (at least while you watch it happening to someone else), then Samuel Beckett's mid-century modernist classic play "Waiting for Godot," now getting a richly satisfying production at the Mark Taper Forum, should be right up your alley.

"He can still sing!" we overheard one distinguished patron of the opera asserting to his wife as they filed out of their seats for intermission at the Wednesday performance of the first-ever LA Opera production of Verdi's "Simon Boccanegra." "And he moves around the stage, too!" the wife observed with comparable enthusiasm. "He," of course, is Placido Domingo, arguably the world's greatest opera singer—and star—of the last four or five decades.

Bekah Brunstetter's slight but largely charming play "Mine" about a thirtysomething romantic triangle is getting a good production right now at the Elephant Stages Performance Lab in Hollywood.

"Clybourne Park" is the most acclaimed new American play of the last several years (since John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt," anyway), and the original off-Broadway production, with the whole original cast, is playing at the Taper this month before moving back for a Broadway run in April.

Jenny Schwartz's recent play "God's Ear" arrives in LA with impeccable New York credentials and impressive notices. So forgive us if we couldn't help feeling like we were watching an extended improv class exercise.

"Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970" embodies only one of many manifestoes inherent in PST's panoply of visual and performance art projects. But it is the one that encapsulates an essential purpose of the whole venture in its declaration that "the history of modern art looks very different when viewed from the West Coast."

If you've ever been on a first date, there may have been at least a fleeting moment when some impression formed in your mind which—whether flattering or insulting, hopeful or disappointed—you recognized it would be especially inappropriate to express aloud, at least right away. But the online daters in Adam Szymkowicz's play Nerve, aren't inhibited like that.

William Faulkner's injunction that "the past is never dead; it's not even past" gets unpacked to powerful effect in Kerr Seth Lordygan's new play "Askance" at the Eclectic Company Theatre.