Lyle Zimskind

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.

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...