Lyle Zimskind

"When it turns midnight on New Year's Eve, it will be the best night ever," says Anna Sophia Berglund. "I'll be like, 'My month is here!'" It's true: the next time the clock strikes twelve, and 2010 morphs into 2011, the Playmate of the Month title will peacefully transfer, as it has for over 50 years, from Miss December to the 24-year-old Palos Verdes Peninsula High School grad for a constitutional term of 31 days. And she plans to appreciate each one.

Stephen Adley Guirgis's The Little Flower of East Orange is a large, enjoyably sprawling play, containing multitudes of theatrical perspectives. For the most part it's a kitchen sink Irish-American family drama as related to us by Danny (Michael Friedman), a young man in and out of rehab whom we learn in the play's opening scene is presently serving a prison sentence. Yet intermittently through much of the first act, we also enter the mind...

It's kind of a gutsy move, before the start of a one-man show about a real-life person, to play extended video footage of that actual person whom the actor is about to recreate. As soon as the actor shows up, the audience is practically compelled to compare his voice, look and mannerisms with what was just up on the screen. But during the twenty or so minutes when the audience files in to the...

Benjamin Burdick's Jan takes those old records off the shelf (photo: Jordana Burn) Truth, love, and the potent spirit of Syd Barrett triumph over lies, hatred, and the dull memory of Gustav Husak in Rock'N'Roll, Tom Stoppard's great play about the long era of totalitarian torpor in Czechoslovakia between the Soviet invasion in 1968 and the Velvet Revolution over two decades later. Since its premiere in London in 2006 and on Broadway the following...

Alex Smith and Sami Klein. Photo by Barbara Kallir It's no accident that the title of the Son of Semele Ensemble's new production, On Emotion, sounds something more like a treatise or philosophical contemplation than a drama. Originally presented in the UK as part of a series of theater essays "On" one or another fundamental human condition (Love, Death, Ego, Religion, Truth, and so on), the play was co-written by theater artist Mick Gordon...

In the final period of his life, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh had at least one very prominent ally--and pen pal. Celebrated author and political gadfly Gore Vidal, intrigued by McVeigh's defiant opposition to the federal government, corresponded with the death row prisoner during the three years before he was executed in a maximum security prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

"That's not writing," Truman Capote once complained about another popular author's book, "it's typing." Well, in Jordan Harrison's new play, Futura, set 35 years from now, typing is all there is. Paper has been made obsolete by the pixelated screen, and no one knows how to manipulate a pen or pencil.

Edmund L. Shaff as Winston Churchill | Photo by Carla Barnett We've already had a couple of occasions in recent months to ruminate on the prevalence of one-person theater performances in LA. But they just keep coming. If we'd wanted to, we could have seen a different solo show every single night last week (OK, maybe we did kind of want to, so let's say: if we'd had the time). In the end we...

Was the word "bittersweet" coined to describe autobiographical-confessional solo theater performance pieces? For as surely as youth leads to adolescence and then adulthood, so are once-close personal ties inevitably frayed as our protagonist embarks on a journey of self-discovery that leads him away from his erstwhile loved ones. By the end, however, the accumulation of mature experience casts those early-life relations in a new light and inspires, if not an actual rapprochement between the...

Photo: Thomas Mikusz Before there was Billy Bragg, before there was Saul Alinsky, before there was Cesar Chavez, before there was Walter Reuther--there were playwright Clifford Odets and the unseen title character of his 1936 play Waiting for Lefty. At the height of the Great Depression, Odets and the legendary Group Theatre created this agitprop classic about a New York taxi drivers' union local meeting and the members' heated argument about whether to go...