Archway Theatre

Tis Pity She's a Whore: Jonny Rodgers and Hannah Skye Wenzel, as brother and sister in lust

The scandal surrounding a love affair between a brother and his sister forms the centerpiece of John Ford's 17th century play, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Archway Theatre's downtown production is this week's pick. See below for all the latest new theater reviews and comprehensive theater listings.

This week's theater feature profiles the co-creators of a new opera, Dulce Rosa being presented by L.A. Opera at the Broad Stage. It launches L.A. Opera's "Off-Grand Initiative."

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Christian Coulson

Playwright Christopher Shinn

"When I grew up," recalls playwright Christopher Shinn, "I grew up with the image of the artist as somebody who could be central to the culture in a big way, and that was the kind of artist I wanted to be. And I remember feeling with Dying City that I might get to be that kind of artist."

Shinn is speaking to LA Weekly by phone from his home in Manhattan about the 9/11 play -- and his eighth major stage work -- that he fully expected to catapult him at the relatively tender age of 30 to the forefront of the American theater. That would finally deliver him his dream of becoming a nationally recognized man of letters, a celebrated playwright of serious works.

Then, the writer continues, in spite of a successful 2006 run at London's Royal Court Theatre and an ecstatically unqualified rave by the New York Times' Ben Brantley for Dying City's 2007 Lincoln Center production, America turned its back. Or at least America's big, career-making regional powerhouses like L.A.'s Center Theatre Group. Now, Dying City will finally receive its local premiere on May 18 at the 99-seat Rogue Machine Theatre.

And while Shinn admits that the reasons for the wider public's indifference might have had something to do with the play's downbeat title or the manner in which it suggested unpleasant, audience-implicating truths about the Iraq War at a time when the country was still hopelessly mired in the conflict, he suspected something more profound was at work -- what he now calls "the new normal" for playwrights and all artists.

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Kevin Scanlon

Prince Gomolvilas

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

While researching The Brothers Paranormal, his latest comedy-horror play, about Thai-American brothers who launch a ghost-hunting business, Prince Gomolvilas was invited to go on a ghost hunt with the Los Angeles Paranormal Association.

The owner of a private residence in Santa Clarita had reported overwhelming paranormal activity: objects flying off shelves, a pinball machine that turned on even when unplugged, children talking to their invisible friends.

Gomolvilas, 40, who says he's "always on the lookout for proof of the paranormal," accompanied three investigators (including Layla Halfhill, a half-Thai American who was on Gomolvilas' favorite ghost-hunting show, Travel Channel's Ghost Adventures) to check it out.

Not only was the woman's house near the epicenter of 1928's St. Francis Dam disaster but the previous owners' daughter had died after falling down a well, and there was a cemetery in the backyard.

See also:
*Our Latest Theater Reviews
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This WeekMore »

Steve O'Bryan

Fathers' Follies stars Michael Naishtut & Raul Lopez

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The year was 1947. Headlines announced the establishment of the Cominform and the formation of the CIA that marked the non-declaration of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

In suburban Glendale, meanwhile, a different kind of stage was being set by ex-G.I.s, former wartime defense workers and the odd Hollywood contract player, who were settling into their postwar, gray-flannel existence of civilian conformity by starting families, buying homes and ... putting on women's dresses.

As legend has it, the historic act of sexually transgressive irony was intended to spice up the annual Father's Night held by the Verdugo Woodlands Elementary School PTA. The wives and kids all liked what they saw, and the following year the show returned fully flowered into a musical-burlesque revue of comic song, dance and bling-bling girly dads.

The Fathers' Follies was born. Sixty-six years later, the Follies have become the longest-running if unlikeliest continuous drag act in Los Angeles and probably in America. To get to the bottom of Glendale's best-kept-secret subculture, LA Weekly attended this past weekend's incarnation of the only-in-L.A., yearly PTA fundraiser.

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Kate Compton

Andrew Hawkes and Johnny Clark in VS Theater's "Cops and Friends of Cops"

L.A. Weekly critic Lovell Estell III found a police melodrama Cops and Friends of Cops to be a refreshingly unpredictable new play, and made it this week's Pick. Good reviews also for Peter Pan, presented by the Blank Theatre at Second Stage, and Falling for Make Believe, a play about the theater at the Colony. For the latest new theater reviews and comprehensive region-wide listings, see below.

This week's main review looks at Marco Ramirez's The Royale at the Kirk Douglas and Theatre Movement Bazaar's Tennessee Williams riff, Hot Cat.

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James Bartlett

Hollywood Bowl sign on Saturday

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*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
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Tickets for the Hollywood Bowl went on general sale to the public Saturday morning at 10 a.m., and for Alisha Staten, Gwen Corben, Sheila Tunnel and their cohorts, this meant their "one night, once a year affair" had started on Friday "in the evening" -- the exact time a secret. Coming from Pomona, Fontana, Downtown LA and other places, the dozen had set out their recliners, opened a bottle of wine and enjoyed the evening.

"I'm always number one in the line, and they're two and three," said Gwen, miffed that "unknowns" -- a couple who kept very much to themselves -- had beaten them to it this year. There's not much controversy here, though some recalled four years ago when security guards and high temper mixed when late arrivals accidentally got called up first:

"We had never been ghetto before, but this time the shit hit the fan," Gwen added.

A warm night had made sleeping in their chairs bearable, and it was an outdoor "party" until the 2 a.m. "lights off," when the Bowl goes dark and it's generally accepted that festivities end. "That's a great time, because the deer come out," said Gwen.

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James Esposito

Alysia Livingston and Charles Mathers in Do Lord Remember Me

Lovell Estell III found Chromolume Theatre's production of Do Lord Remember Me stirring, and made it this week's Pick. Neal Weaver also found a multimedia Brecht on Brecht at Atwater Village Theater praiseworthy. See below for all the latest new theater reviews and regionwide stage listings.

This week's theater feature looks at a pair of plays in small theaters that examine black-white relations -- Wallace Demmaria's new play Colorblind at Meta Theatre and Herb Gardner's 1985 comedy I'm Not Rappaport at the Pico Playhouse, though the latter is more about aging.

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Photo: Sogetsu Foundation, Tokyo.

An Iemoto Ikebana Live show in Hokkaido, Japan, June 2009.

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*5 Dance Shows to See in L.A. This Week

The North American Sogetsu Seminar is like the Olympics of flower arranging (though, of course, only for North America). Held once every four years in a different North American city, the five day seminar on the ancient Japanese art of flower arranging known as ikebana (ike = living, bana = flowers) arrives in Los Angeles for the first time this weekend with a host of workshops, lectures and receptions expected to attract participants from all over the world.

The jewel in the crown for enthusiasts is the first live theatrical performance of ikebana to be given in the United States. Titled Iemoto Ikebana Live and held on Saturday at the Aratani Japan America Theater downtown, this event features Akane Teshigahara, the world renowned Iemoto (or headmaster) of the prestigious Sogetsu School of Ikebana in Tokyo, as she creates a spectacular stage-size flower arrangement in a carefully choreographed and orchestrated demonstration of the art set to music. (Unfortunately, it's sold out).

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Kim Chueh

Our Class

Our critic Deborah Klugman found Tadeusz Slobodzianek's drama, about Polish complicity in the German Nazis' persecution of Polish Jews in the 1940s, and presented by Son of Semele Ensemble at Atwater Village Theatre, to be a model of stagecraft and emotional to watch. For all the lastest new theater reviews, see below.

A pair of plays, each performed by two actors, is the topic of this week's theater feature. Bart DeLorenzo directs Annapurna, featuring married couple and comedy duo Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman. Meanwhile, The Skylight Theatre presents Allen Barton's Years to the Day at the Beverly Hills Playhouse.

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Anna Jones

Performers Moira MacDonald, Whitney Rodriguez, Stephen Schilling and Mark Simon and musician Kari Rae Seekins rehearse a scene from "Exhibit A" onstage at Automata in Chinatown.

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*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
*L.A.'s Best Experimental Puppet Theater
*Move Over, West Hollywood -- Silver Lake Is the True Gay Mecca
*Silver Lake Has Always Been Gay, Readers Say

Let's face it, puppets are cool. Automata, the non-profit experimental puppet theater and workshop that is quickly gaining a reputation as the center of cutting edge puppetry in Los Angeles, is yet again proving just how cool puppets can be with their latest production, Exhibit A, which opens today, for a two-weekend run. But the puppets you'll find at Automata aren't your average goofy, fuzzy, kid-stuff. L.A. Weekly sat in on a tech rehearsal this weekend and got a sneak peek.

In the show, a cast of life-size strangely beautiful puppets and live actors all play a number of different characters, mixing and melding personas in a dance both graceful and jarring. But the show goes beyond just entertainment value. Susan Simpson, the director of Exhibit A and co-founder of Automata, has a sophisticated vision of what this show can accomplish in the local arts community, both educationally and politically.

Exhibit A focuses mainly on the inner lives of some key members of the Mattachine Society, one of the very first homosexual activism groups in the United States when it was founded in L.A. in 1950. By the 1960s, the organization had chapters in cities all over the U.S.

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