War! Plus dramas about despots...and couples
The sudden relevance of 'All My Sons', and comments on 16 other productions
The US started a war four days ago. And LA theater has yet to address this crisis?
OK, I’m being unrealistic. Readers of my last edition of Angeles Stage might recall that I observed that theaters require much more time to comment on current events than, say, Bruce Springsteen or late-night TV comics.
But events can also suddenly increase the relevance of previously planned theatrical productions. That’s what happened to the revival of “All My Sons” that opened Saturday at Antaeus Theatre in Glendale.
The premiere of Arthur Miller’s play was in early 1947 — still in the aftermath of World War II. The play’s narrative occurs around the same time. But we soon learn the backstory of these characters — a criminal trial of two manufacturing partners who shipped defective cylinder heads for military aircraft that resulted in the deaths of 21 American pilots. One of the partners was exonerated in the trial, but the other was convicted and imprisoned. Meanwhile, one of the exonerated partner’s sons, who was himself a pilot during the war, is still missing long after any “action” has ceased.
Before I watched Antaeus’ remarkably powerful revival, staged by Oánh Nguyễn, I had just read of our new war’s first American deaths (six so far, plus more than 700 in Iran, 40 in Lebanon, at least 11 in Israel and others in the UAR and Gulf states). I continued pondering those deaths in conjunction with my thoughts on the play.
No one would claim that Trump’s arbitrary new war is as justifiable as America’s entry into World War II. Yet there are already grieving US families from Trump’s war. They’ll find no comfort in his remark that “Sadly there will likely be more” (deaths of US troops) “before it ends. That’s the way it is. Likely be more” — before returning his attention back to other priorities, such as ballrooms.
I hadn’t seen “All My Sons” in years, so I was intensely on edge as it unfurled, wondering what would happen next (don’t read synopses before you go). The key players are Bo Foxworth as the recently exonerated Joe Keller, Tessa Auberjonois as his wife, and Matthew Grondin as their other son, who now has started to woo his still-missing brother’s girlfriend (Shannon Lee Clair), the daughter of the imprisoned partner. Kudos also to the design team — especially Fred Kinney, Andrew Schmedake and Jeff Gardner. Their images interrupt the neighborhood’s placid surface with periodic thunder and lightning that set the stage for the narrative fireworks that follow.
A Miller play from 1967, “The Price,” was also revived this weekend, at Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice, but it has none of the immediacy and power of “All My Sons.” It’s largely a series of long conversations about what happened in the past between two middle-aged brothers. One is a cop contemplating retirement, the other is a successful doctor. The play’s saving grace is the octogenarian antique dealer (Richard Fancy), who provides a few moments of leavening humor as he considers the contents of the attic (designed by Rich Rose) that belongs to the brothers’ family.
Despot dramas
Trump’s ambitions and actions often seem despotic. But despots are not all alike. Let’s look at depictions of other despots on LA stages.
“Richard III,” at A Noise Within in east Pasadena, is probably the best of the lot, Shakespeare’s early play is often confusing to modern audiences and somewhat inaccurate, according to many historians. But Guillermo Cienfuegos’ staging is set in what looks more or less like the mid-20th century (striking costumes designed by Christine Cover Ferro). This allows spectators to spend less time trying to sift through the intricate regal relations from centuries ago and instead to concentrate on the poetry of the language, the fluidity of the movement and the total command by Ann Noble in the title role, with her (or is it Richard’s?) head topped by a shock of fiery red hair, as opposed to a conventional crown. Gee, can you think of another would-be despot whose hair frequently attracts surprising attention?
Imelda Marcos obtained autocratic powers — and money to burn — through her marriage to Ferdinand Marcos, the president of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986, with martial law in place over that period’s last 14 years. Her son is now the country’s president. She is the subject of the LA premiere of “Here Lies Love,” at the Mark Taper Forum. The concept, music and lyrics are by David Byrne, with additional music by Fatboy Slim.
The music here is slim pickings. The relentless disco beat in this almost entirely sung script irons out the story’s dramatic wrinkles, which conceivably could have been more interesting with a more varied score. Apparently Imelda used to enjoy disco, but why does it set the tone of the entire production? The still-living Imelda is said to want the words “here lies love” on her tombstone — but why use such a misleading phrase as the title? And why add a drag queen named “Imeldific” as a narrator? Perhaps director Snehal Desai, artistic director of Center Theatre Group, feels the “love”? I didn’t. “Evita,” this isn’t.
You’ve heard of “benign despots”? Emperor Joseph II of the Holy Roman Empire was considered one of those. He encouraged and commissioned composers Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Mozart to compose their music within his court. (Compare this to former TV star Trump, who added his own name to the Kennedy Center but is closing the venue for two years, although he now says the “Trump Kennedy Center Honors” TV program will continue elsewhere.)
At Pasadena Playhouse, director Darko Tresnjak’s revival of Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play “Amadeus” — about the supposed rivalry between Salieri (Jefferson Mays) and Mozart (Sam Clemmett) — is set entirely within Joseph’s Vienna court, as represented by towering red walls designed by Alexander Dodge. Mozart died at home, but here he dies within the court walls.
I was irritated by a promotional email from this production that asked “What’s fact and what’s fiction? Find out when you see Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, now playing on our stage through Mar. 15.” In fact, at the theater I saw scant evidence that the play or the Playhouse’s printed materials help us discern “what’s fact and what’s fiction.” A tiny notation on page P11 of the printed program simply asks “Is there a grain of truth in the story of Amadeus, or the echo of a centuries-old rumor? The music never lies — we’ll let you decide.”
So we’re supposed to listen to music (maybe whole pieces, instead of the adulterated excerpts heard here) in order to discern the historical accuracy of this account? How about consulting historians who did the research and concluded that this script is mostly fiction? I imagine that most spectators who aren’t musicologists accept Shaffer’s script as having more than “a grain of truth” — if only because most of us first learned about Salieri via Shaffer.
Anyway, the star performances of the composers are more or less what you would expect of any professional “Amadeus,” occasionally verging on overacting. But I don’t have much of a memory of previous performances of the emperor himself, and I was struck by the tall, thin Matthew Patrick Davis’ appearances as the emperor. Later research revealed that Joseph was indeed tall and thin by the era’s standards, so I guess that at least that part of the show was accurate.
One more despot/king is on stage right now, in John Guerra’s “Room by the Sea,” at Outside In Theatre — in a co-production with Coin & Ghost and After Hours Theatre — in Highland Park. The characters have no names, and the king rules “an island nation in some unnamed sea,” says the script. But the program notes explicitly refer to the myth of Icarus and Daedalus, which supposedly occurred in Crete. Leaving the mythology aside, I was frustrated by the slow pacing of the script and the staging, and by the fact that we don’t see actually see one of the leading characters. Still, it was great to see Cole Massie, a wheelchair user who has cerebral palsy and a visual impairment, playing “Boy.”
Meanwhile, “Red Harlem,” at Company of Angels in Boyle Heights, is a play that’s adjacent to titanic despots Hitler and Stalin — without getting close to them. Maybe the reason is that this script really wants to be a novel or a movie, formats that would allow a lot more detail about the period to emerge. Anyway, Black performers from Harlem in 1932 are hired to go to Russia, via Berlin, to perform in a Stalinist anti-American film. An excessive number of twists and turns and minor characters (including Ralph Bunche) appear along the way. Oddly enough, Langston Hughes is identified as the screenwriter (apparently based on a real experience in his life), but he is not one of the many characters.
Rep, for real
South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa has revived the third word in its name this year, presenting two four-character plays in actual repertory, including two actors who are in both plays.
Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” features volcanic but frequently hilarious performances from Kim Martin-Cotten as the more aggressive Martha and Brian Vaughn as the more passive-aggressive George. After seeing a matinee, I returned for an evening performance of Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage” (in Christopher Hampton’s English translation) and watched the two actors trade their positions on the aggression scale. In the much shorter “Carnage,” Vaughn’s character is the more aggressive, while Martin-Cotten’s is the more passive-aggressive.
Lisa Rothe’s staging of “Who’s Afraid” lasts more than three hours (including two intermissions), set more or less in “real time” (which it uses much more effectively than did the recent “Stereophonic”), as it displays George and Martha’s after-hours coming-to-terms with the wreckage of their lives, including their previous pretense of parenthood.
Each of the plays features two couples, but the “Carnage” characters — the parents of two 11-year-olds who were fighting in a park — are more or less the same ages, compared to those in Albee’s play, so the other two actors in each play don’t do double duty. Befitting its relative brevity, “God of Carnage” is a lighter satire, but director Marco Barricelli’s offering does feature one gasp-inducing scene that I won’t give away for those of you who, like me, didn’t remember it in advance.
Literary dreams — then and now
Geffen Playhouse’s production of Beth Hyland’s “Sylvia Sylvia Sylvia” takes us to a Boston apartment in 1958, when real-life poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes lived there, before fame — but also at the same location in the present, when it’s occupied by struggling young writers whose first names also begin with an S and a T, Sally and Theo. The script struck me as too inside-literary-baseball, and — as with “Red Harlem,” above —the material might actually work better as a novel than as a play. Of course the characters themselves are trying to write for readers in print, not the stage; maybe Hyland should do the same. But then how many young people are trying to write novels these days, compared to the literary scene back then? And why does the title have three “Sylvia”s, instead of two?
Speaking of the livelier literary scene roughly 65 years ago, Shem Bitterman’s “The Typist,” at Hudson Guild Theater in Hollywood, enters the ratty Greenwich Village apartment of a self-consciously hip writer, who has hired a woman of his youngish generation — but originally from the Midwest— to type his novel. He hopes it will win “the National Book Award next year.” That these opposites attract is a bit predictable, but it’s also more than a bit charming in the hand of actors Noah James and Evangeline Edwards, directed by Jeremy Wechsler. It’s a production of Plays With People and Danna Hyams.
‘Lifeline’ leads the latest LGBTQ+ parade
Robert Axelrod’s funny and then poignant “Lifeline” takes us to training sessions at an LGBTQ+ suicide prevention call center. Most of the fictional trainees identify somewhere within that acronym. We hear their backstories, but we also meet a middle-aged straight woman (Amy Tolsky), who volunteers for a reason that I shouldn’t reveal in advance. Director Ken Sawyer eliminated some of the upper seating at the sharply raked Road Theatre in North Hollywood and uses onstage chairs for a few audience members to make the atmosphere more immersive.
Michael Van Duzer’s “Incitation to the Dance,” at Theatre West in the Cahuenga Pass, depicts an LA household shared by two men. Their bond is threatened when one of them, a somewhat disabled film professor who is currently exploring the queer coding in the 1946 Hollywood film “Gilda,” invites a much younger dancer at a gay club into the home. The professor’s longtime partner — who seems to be aging out of his career as a more respectable dance instructor — objects. The two dancers’ rivalry is sometimes expressed in, yes, dance. The situation held my interest, but the dance scenes seem a bit artificially choreographed.
However, “Incitation” is leagues ahead of “Luca & Uri,” a paint-by-numbers duet by Nicholas Pilapil, at Victory Theatre in North Hollywood. It charts the rise and fall (starting with the fall and then continuing at the beginning) of a relationship between two young gay academics (one in science, the other in mythology) in LA, interrupted by too many laborious scene changes.
“Poetry for the People: the June Jordan Experience,” an ostensible salute to the pioneering bisexual poet, at the Fountain Theatre in east Hollywood, is more substantive but not much more accomplished. It’s a mishmash of techniques, including expendable moments when the audience is invited to write our own impromptu poetry in notebooks provided by the cast and even to read it aloud if we so choose. The five-women ensemble sometimes seems so busy that they get in each other’s way and even momentarily divert attention from Jordan.
And back to straighter fare
International City Theatre in Long Beach has revived “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change,” a mostly amusing sketch comedy revue. The material is often sung, but not always. The script and lyrics are by Joe DiPietro, with music by Jerry Roberts. Four very versatile actors (Michael Austin Deni, Erika Schindele, Will Riddle, Whitney Kathleen Vigil) play many characters with ages from their 20s into their 70s, at which point the material becomes more touching than funny. The show was first introduced to the area at Laguna Playhouse in 1997 and reached LA in 1998. It’s unusual for 2026 LA theater in that the couples are all hetero and all white, but director Barry Pearl and a two-man band keep it lively, generating a lot of laughs along the way.
Talk about “Now Change” in that last title — that’s exactly what happens in “Honour.” This 1995 play by the Australian writer Joanna Murray-Smith, previously seen at the Matrix Theatre in 2005, takes the subject of couples breaking up much more seriously, as we watch a journalist leave his wife for a much younger woman. The best performance here is by Marcia Cross as the abandoned spouse.
But in a sense the star here is the venue. “Honour” has the honor of being the first production in Ruskin Group Theatre’s new and larger home, with adjacent 82-seat and 60-seat venues. It’s a short walk west of its previously cramped space, but it’s still across the street from the Santa Monica airport — which itself is expected to close at the end of 2028.