Stage Raw: L.A. Marathons

Also at your fingertips, the latest NEW THEATER REVIEWS, and our REPORT of Monday night's 30th annual L.A. Weekly Awards.


Rosalind Productions' staging of Shaw's Misalliance continues at the Odyssey. Photo by Christopher Moscatiello

Check back here Monday after noon for this weekend's new reviews of: George Bernard Shaw's Misalliance, presented by Rosalind Productios at the Odyssey Theatre; The 25th anniversary revival of Bill Barker's midwest family drama, Best Wishes, presented by Crown City Theatre Company in North Hollywood; Los Angeles Theatre Ensemble's second installment of its War Cycle series, this installment is called Survived, it plays at the Powerhouse Theatre in Santa Monica; also in Santa Monica, Joshua Grenrock and Catherine Shreiber's Desperate Writers: The Final Draft, at the Edgemar Center for the Arts; Buzzworks Theater Company  (who comedically eviscerated Maxwell Anderson's The Bad Seed) is back in town with the L.A. premiere of Kim Porter's Munched -- "part medical mystery, part family drama, it investigates Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy"; Ghost Road Company presents Katharine Noon's Oresteia adaptation, Home Siege Home (see "Continue Reading" tab below) at [Inside] the Ford; more goofy winging-it with famous authors from Impro Theatre in Tennessee Williams Unscripted, at Theatre Asylum; Theresa Rebeck's Mauritius gets its L.A. premiere at the Pasadena Playhouse; Murray Mednick's Destruction of the 4th World (see "Continue Reading" tab below), downtown at Art Share; and Chalk Rep goes inside a different private home every night to stage Julia Edwards' Family Planning.

For more on Padua Playwrights/Zoo District's Mednick-fest, and for more on Home Siege Home, press the  Continue Reading tab directly below

L.A. MARATHONS: ONLY THE HEARTY NEED APPLY

A pair of ambitious and heady repertories continue in Hollywood and downtown.

Padua Playwrights is launching what it hopes to be festivals of is resident scribes. This first incarnation is dedicated to the writings of Murray Mednick, an instrumental figure in the L.A.'s play development process from the '70s through mid-'90s, because of the benign, supportive way he ran the nationally heralded Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop Festival, every summer in the hills above Claremont.

Two of Mednick's poetical-mythic plays (The Destruction of the Fourth World, presented by Zoo District, and Clown Show for Bruno, a Padua Playwrights production) grapple with issues of mortality and the Holocaust via some Borscht-Belt riffs. They perform in repertory with the film of Mednick's Girl on a Bed; downtown at Art Share, 801 East 4th Place. (213) 625-1766.  www.paduaplaywrights.net

Meanwhile, in the Hollywood Hills at [Inside] the Ford, Ghost Road Company presents Katharine Noon's Home Siege Home -- a three-and-a-half-hour quasi- contemporary adaptation of Aeschylus' The Orestia -- that can be viewed over two evenings, or two shows in one day.
[Inside] the Ford, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood. Visit www.fordtheatres.org