Lyle Zimskind

Jack Stehlin and John F. Bocca, photo: Ed Krieger Shakespeare’s first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, doesn’t get a lot of respect. Mainly because it’s such a gory mess, an onslaught of war crimes, dismemberment, rape, cannibalism, infanticide, and…the like. In Titus Redux, a new adaptation of the Elizabethan off-classic which opened Sunday night, two collaborating L.A. theater companies harness the bloody raw material of the original and shift its milieu from the ancient Romans’ war...

Susan Hanfield and Keith Wyffels in 'The Exercise' at The Lounge Theatre. | Photo: WYNSOLO Photography In 1968 a play called The Exercise opened on Broadway. It closed after five performances. Why was that? Well, if you really have a morbid historical curiosity about these things, you can go see for yourself as this two-person drama is now getting its West Coast premiere production at the Lounge Theatre in Hollywood. Caveat emptor, though. The...

Kareem Ferguson, Kathleen Mary Carthy and Frank Ashmore in the Colony Theatre Company's West Coast Premiere production of "FREE MAN OF COLOR." | Photo by Michael Lamont The prospect of a two-plus-hour history lesson might not seem like the motivation you’ve been waiting for to get off your sofa and into a theater seat this summer. But the story of John Newton Templeton, the fourth African American to graduate from college in the United...

Hiwa Bourne and Alina Phelan in Shake at the Theatre of Note. You know the old joke about what happens when you play a country music song backwards? The singer gets a job, he sobers up, his girl falls in love with him. That's also pretty much the story of Shake, a play by Joshua Fardon that just opened its world premiere run at Hollywood's Theatre of NOTE. Like Harold Pinter's Betrayal (and the...

Tory Kittles and Tessa Aberjonois in the world premiere of Bones at the CTG/Kirk Douglas Theatre. | Photo: Craig Schwartz Every unhappy family may be unique, as Tolstoy advised us, but the family we meet in Obie Award-winner Dael Orlandersmith's new play Bones is really, really unhappy. Traumatized. Scarred by at least two generations of physical, psychological and sexual abuse. Which prompts the thirty-year-old Leah (Tessa Auberjonois) to write a letter to her twin...