Lyle Zimskind

"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.

We've been trying to catch as many of the Pacific Standard Time exhibitions as our schedule and gas budget will allow. Our most recent drop-in was at LACMA, where three distinctive installations (all still on view for another few weeks) each stopped us in our tracks in a total of less than two hours.

At the very beginning of Laura Yee's riotous farce "Ching Chong Chinaman," as the uber-assimilated Wong family poses for its annual Christmas card photo, the father instructs his wife and children to open their eyes "nice and wide." In the next scene, each parent enters the kitchen without recognizing that the teenage boy at the table is someone other than their own son. Turns out his name is Jinqiang or, as best as the Wongs can figure out how to pronounce it, "Ching Chong."

"Romeo et Juliette" is not one of the masterworks of the repertory, but, performed well, it does offer a compelling French interpretation of this most classic of all love stories. And with five impassioned duets between the pair of star-cross'd lovers, any performance of the opera rises or falls primarily on the qualities of the two lead singers. Both of them here are knockouts.

By the time a B-list Shakespearean actor in a soiled and sweat-stained suit peers out from backstage to start Stephen Wyatt's play "The Standard Bearer," any vestiges of British cultural hegemony have long since collapsed.

John Leguizamo's latest autobiographical one-man show, "Ghetto Klown," the fifth in a series that started with "Mambo Mouth" in 1991, captures the hyperbolically charismatic performer in a reflective, almost analytic, mode. Of course even a reflective and analytical Leguizamo on his own operates at a more frenetic pace than a pack of hounds picking up the scent of their prey.