\”From these two heads the future will emerge…. Who will live and who will die\” — Margrethe Bohr in \”Copenhagen.\”\n\nThe two heads cited in this apocalyptic pronouncement belonged to two of the most brilliant theoretical physicists of the first half of the 20th century, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, both Nobel Laureates.
Tim Robbins spied \”Mephisto,\” the Nazi-era play based on Klaus Mann\’s 1936 novel about an actor who pandered to the Nazis to advance his career, while rifling through a box of books on his way out of an English-language bookstore in Paris last March. The actor-writer-activist, then on location with Jonathan Demme\’s film, \”The Truth About Charlie,\” was searching for plays to direct at the Actors\’ Gang, the boldly original Los Angeles troupe he\’d co-founded with UCLA peers in 1981.
The ghost of Lenny Bruce still haunts North Hollywood.
Just around the corner from the Lankershim Boulevard hobby shop where Bruce was busted for heroin in 1962, \”Lenny\’s Back\” at the American Renegade Theatre offers a thoughtful, stinging monologue from the grave.
Since it opened at Broadway\’s Imperial Theater on Sept. 22, 1964, \”Fiddler on the Roof\” with the late Zero Mostel as Tevye, the milkman trying to preserve his family\’s traditions in the face of a changing world, is still part of the tapestry of Jewish and American culture.
\”I don\’t think of myself as a drag performer,\” confides Miriam Shor. \”But I was drawn to the role because the story is so subversive. I like that it challenges perspectives about what a man is and what a woman is. I like that it forces viewers to rethink their labels about sex and sexuality.\”
When Heidi Joyce thinks Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she thinks comedy. It\’s worked for her before in an effort to combat domestic abuse, and it works again in her new play, \”Friends and Enemies.\”
Best known for her \”Stand Up Against Domestic Violence\” comedy fundraisers, Joyce opens her first full-length play this week, which runs through July 29 at North Hollywood\’s Bitter Truth Playhouse.
\”I still write a lot from anger,\” playwright Mark Medoff said. \”I\’ve wanted to flagellate the world.\”\n\nMedoff, 61, is the author of the smoldering plays \”When You Comin\’ Back, Red Ryder?\” \”Children of a Lesser God\” and \”Road to a Revolution,\” now at Deaf West Theatre. His intense work often rails against a world he perceives as rife with violence, racism and sexism. Several childhood memories fuel the rage, he revealed during a telephone interview from his New Mexico ranch.
At Wilshire Boulevard Temple\’s Westside campus this month, Juliet Landau, who was raised in an assimilated Jewish home, will again take a walk on the dark side, but in a very different kind of play.
Dr. John Menkes\’ \”Lady Macbeth Gets a Divorce\” at the Beverly Hills Playhouse is a witty and diverting drawing-room comedy that elicits something most sitcoms don\’t: real laughs.
Welcome to the multicultural Los Angeles landscape of \”For Here or To Go?,\” a 42-character play in rhymed verse about the challenges of life in L.A., courtesy of the Cornerstone Theater Company.
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