Bill Raden
LA Weekly
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Past articles by Bill:
For the Love of Brings the Raucous World of Roller Derby to the Stage
Gina Femia’s all-women twist on the venerable locker-room drama doesn’t exactly reinvent the sports narrative but it does persuasively demonstrate how invigorating it can be to simply reorient hoary sports tropes with a new gender perspective. That fresh spin, plus sizzling choreography by director Rhonda Kohl and... → Read More
An African-American Funeral Parlor Becomes a Battleground in a Searing New Play About Traumatic Loss
Before getting to the whats of The Willows, Kerri-Ann McCalla’s family drama about melancholy and traumatic loss, which is getting a polished world premiere at Bootleg Theatre, it may shed some light to talk about the what-it-is-nots. → Read More
An Undivided Heart Investigates Common Denominator Between #MeToo and Predator Priests
By now it’s an all-too-familiar story: A powerful institution is racked by news of long-standing sexual abuses as the innocent are further victimized by a code of silence that protects the powerful and perpetuates their crimes. → Read More
Reality Bites — If You Can Even Call It Reality — In This Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Satire
If Gordon Dahlquist's Wake sounds vaguely Matrix-like, the similarity is strictly ironic. → Read More
Day of the Dead in the Inland Empire Comes to Life as a Fever Dream in Sharon Yablon's Hello Stranger
Not surprisingly for a Yablon play, her version of the Inland Empire is peopled with a supporting cast of outlandishly dysfunctional emotional cripples. → Read More
Will Angelenos Pay $5,000 for a Theater Ticket? A New Immersive Stage Company Is Betting Yes
A week before opening, You had already sold out its first seven evenings to several recording and TV stars, with the balance made up of executives from the corporate and finance worlds. → Read More
Trump's America Is Hard on Women in Five Short Plays by Female Playwrights
The thoughtfully produced evening of one-act plays lives on in "Nevertheless, She Persisted," Echo Theater Company’s latest collection of commissioned... → Read More
An L.A. DREAMer’s Solo Show About Living Under the Threat of Trump Delivers Nail-Biting Suspense
Alpharaoh’s 90-minute solo performance is a singularly moving chronicle of the threat posed by the election of Donald Trump to the country's 750,000... → Read More
Emma Stone's Ill-Fated One-Woman Show in La La Land Now Has a Drag Parody
As any Angeleno can attest, Hollywood rarely gets it as wrong as when it depicts onscreen the city that exists just outside its studio gates. And although criticizing a commercial blockbuster for its lack of verisimilitude is a bit like accusing the pot of being black, when the offending flick... → Read More
Inspired by the Colorado Gay Wedding Cake Case, The Cake Explores the Casualties of Religious Homophobia
One doesn’t need to look far for real-life parallels to the colliding worldviews that form the main ingredients for The Cake, the offbeat problem play... → Read More
A New Stage History of the United Farm Workers Fails to Crack the Enigma of Cesar Chavez
The mythic figure of Cesar Chavez literally looms over The Sweetheart Deal. → Read More
Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House Is the Perfect Setting For a Play — Almost
At first blush, using Barnsdall Art Park’s iconic Hollyhock House as the setting for director Kate Jopson's environmental staging of María Irene Fornés' wryly metaphysical, 1977 feminist drama Fefu and Her Friends might seem inspired. The Frank Lloyd Wright 1920s landmark, with its bas-relief masonry and magnificently detailed woodwork and furnishings, fits... → Read More
The Kansas Collection, Immersive Alternative Reality Game, Imagines Los Angeles as a Dystopian Oz
Kansas is what might be called "aggressively interactive" theater. → Read More
Rules of Seconds, John Pollono's Pitch-Black Comedy About Dueling, Deconstructs Masculine Honor
Although the duel of honor has been virtually extinct in America since the Civil War, the rigid social code it adjudicated is immediately grasped by every schoolboy who defends his dignity in a playground fistfight. What may be less understood in today’s schoolyards is the extent to which our adult... → Read More
The Offending Gesture Lampoons What Hitler’s Dog and America’s Misadventure in Iraq Have in Common
Currently receiving its West Coast premiere by Son of Semele Ensemble in director Edgar Landa’s riotously pitched production, Mac Wellman’s densely... → Read More
Annie Lesser's Immersive, Interactive Black Comedy C(ovell) Has Taken Over an East Hollywood Wine Bar
C(ovell) is Lesser's most ambitious and wryly funny work to date. → Read More
Shelter Brings the Horrors of the Central American Refugee Crisis to the Eastside of L.A.
It was supposed to be a grand, visually stylized, outdoor stage spectacle befitting the urgency and epic scale of the human suffering it means to theatricalize — the perilous mass exodus of U.S.-bound child refugees fleeing the savage gang and drug cartel violence that has given Central America the dubious... → Read More
Movie Star-Playwright Jesse Eisenberg Shouldn't Quit His Day Job
What?! You mean Jesse Eisenberg isn’t in it? — dismayed theatergoer overheard outside the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. It’s tempting to approach The Revisionist, the sophomore playwriting effort by film star Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network), with a certain amount of skepticism. Though the actor, who is... → Read More
A 183-Year-Old Racial Casting Controversy Feels Eerily Current in Red Velvet
This year’s call for an Oscars boycott over the Academy Awards’ spurning of actors of color comes as the latest reminder that, to paraphrase von Clausewitz, art is the continuation of politics with other means. Nowhere is that dictum clearer than in Othello. And in few other cities does the... → Read More
This Weirdest Dinner Party Ever is Going Down at a House in Koreatown
It’s not easy to characterize And the Drum, the weird and whimsical but profoundly captivating site-specific stage hybrid from Capital W, the experimental theater collective comprised of director-writer Lauren Ludwig and producer Monica Miklas. On its website, the show is badly described as “immersive dance theater fused with a dinner... → Read More