Lyle Zimskind

Richard does a lot of nothing. Richard does so much of nothing that the walls of West Hollywood's Lee Strasberg Theatre are covered with almost 100 stenciled placards detailing all the nothing Richard does, including "Richard Chases A Tennis Ball," "Richard Says He Doesn't Know," "Richard Selects Light Mayo," "Richard Does Some Mental Math" and, of course, "Richard Wakes Up."

"There are more things in hell, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." This gleeful distortion of Hamlet's admonition could fairly be posted over the entrance to Zombie Joe's Underground itself as a tidy summary of the company's functional ethos. And it also well encapsulates playwright Richard Nathan's riotous new parody of the ubiquitous tragedy, now titled "Hamlet, Prince of Darkness," which ZJU is presenting at 11 p.m. every Friday night through the end of June.

On their way to winning the 1965 World Series, the Dodgers of Chavez Ravine clashed with the despised San Francisco Giants in Major League Baseball's most legendary bench-clearing brawl after Giants ace Juan Marichal brought his bat down on the bare head of Dodgers catcher John Roseboro.

Thirty-five years after he took his first shot at directing "Three Sisters" for LA's now-venerable Company of Angels, Pavel Cerny is tackling the classic again at the Whitefire Theatre in Sherman Oaks. This time around, Cerny has shifted the action forward some eight or nine decades to take place in the Perestroika era of the mid- to late...

Early on in Fin Kennedy's play "How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found," a doctor diagnoses young London advertising account executive Charlie (Brad Culver) as suffering from depression. But "I don't think the problem lies with me," Charlie insists. "I think things might genuinely be shit."

If you love old Jews telling jokes, you'll like the first act of Goodbye, Louie...Hello, the late TV comedy writer Allan Manings's play about a pair of old-time comics. Back in the golden age of live television, Louie (Alan Freeman) was a big star and Benjy (an excellent Steve Franken) was his frequent sidekick. Now that they're...

Lamenting that we live in a “magic-less time,” quirky old Zak and his perky old wife Eva harness ancient spiritual powers to bring two lovers together and stave off environmental destruction in Anthony F. Cronin’s new play, Come Sundown, at the Ruskin Group Theatre.

Most boy-meets-girl comedies don't really explore the science that underlies the romantic chemistry between their two lead lovebirds. But since both the boy and the girl in Keith Huff's endearing new play, Pursued by Happiness, are Eli Lilly company biochemists, we do learn that according to one theory, at least, we're all neurologically hardwired to let happiness catch up with us at some point.

The high price of heroism for U.S. enlisted men in Iraq is explored in two very different plays that opened in small LA theaters last weekend. In Samuel Brett Williams's The Woodpecker, Jimmy (Brian Norris), a facially disfigured glue-sniffing college dropout who lives in a trailer park with his grossly dysfunctional parents, prays that heading off to war will give him the chance to become a hero.

Ivana Milicevic and Amanda Detmer (Photo: Kurt Boetcher) What do you do if you get an e-mail from a stranger in distress who just came into a huge inheritance, but urgently needs your help secreting the money away from menacing political or family figures? Of course, you'll be rewarded with a generous cut of the proceeds yourself if you're willing to do the right thing and take part in the plan. Obviously you e-mail...