It’s kind of nice that in the 21st Century, a story about Jekyll and Hyde can be as funny as Lauren Wilson’s Chemical Imbalance. When unleashed on the Victorian public in 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson’s little novella was actually scary. It depicted how man’s evil nature can fester while only…

According to classical physics, the universe could be imagined as a giant billiards table. An indeterminate number of years ago, some great force broke the ball rack with a giant pool cue. Since then, the billiard balls — the particles that make up the stars and you and me and…

American high schools are more than just places kids go to have their intellectual curiosity extinguished. They are also, for many sensitive and socially awkward souls, something very like torture chambers. For these youngsters, the hallways are gauntlets. For them, sex is a perilous trial they suspect they’ll never negotiate,…

On December 5, as this bleary-eyed adult chugged bitter gas-station coffee in the parking lot of Plantation’s American Heritage School at the ugly hour of 8 a.m. — on a Saturday! way the hell out west! — there was a riot of teenaged bodies at the foot of the big…

Awkward silence is bad, but we have it for a reason: Whatever we might say in its stead would be worse. The awkward silence is a product of the forebrain, of the superego, of consciousness. It springs from the place where we keep our propriety and manners. It is a…

I cannot imagine any play more right for the moment than The Voysey Inheritance. Nor can I imagine any play more wrong. On the one hand, The Voysey Inheritance is about, among other things, Ponzi schemes, financial disaster, and money’s way of making slaves out of those who care about…

For a while, there really were only two known Jews living in Afghanistan. Their names were Isaac Levin and Zebulon Simentov, and they hated each other. Documentary footage shot in the wake of the 2001 ouster of the Taliban regime shows two men driven through their long, lonely, and largely…

A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen There is a thick film of half-digested plaster and pressboard coating the streets of downtown West Palm Beach this week. It is all that remains of the once-proud scenery that actress Margery Lowe, in a frenzy of dramatic overachievement, chewed and swallowed and regurgitated…

Two years ago, an editor complained to me that his daughter was using the word random too much. It’s not just her, I told him. Random has lately invaded the adolescent lexicon with nearly the force mustered by cool in the 1950s. In the past decade, random has proliferated almost…

For years, whenever anybody said the words Caldwell Theatre, I thought of money, dancing girls, big production numbers, jukebox musicals, innocuous social commentary, musty classics, occasional glimmers of inspiration, screeching hearing aids, and old people. It hadn’t always been thus. When Caldwell opened under the leadership of Executive Artistic Director…

Vices begins with a sexy dance and a hard funk-rock instrumental that is leaner, meaner, weirder, and more modern than any bit of music I’ve ever heard played on Caldwell Theatre’s big stage. Watching those dancers, hearing that noise, it seems obvious that Caldwell’s new artistic director, Clive Cholerton, is…

Jesus, they’re still here. How? In the last dozen years, the salty boys of Aerosmith have endured a string of mishaps so consistent and awful that any more perceptive band would have long ago decided that some wrathful cosmic force was telling them to retire. Consider these grim events, in…

Apparently, one out of every six kids in SoFla goes without proper nutrition. This is wrong – especially since the other five kids are fat – which is why you should pony up the $100 to $250 it takes to attend this year’s Taste of the Nation. TotN is an…

After titillating audiences at the Arsht Center for a month, Summer Shorts – South Florida’s biggest and weirdest theater tradition – comes to the Broward Center in all its ribald and risque wrongness. You’ve got two programs, Signature Shorts (made up of eight short plays, from playwrights including the deceased…

Good theater is where you find it, and through July 19 at Rising Action Theatre, you’ll find it in actor John McGlothlin’s stubbly, twitching face, which spends the heartbreaking second act of Bent staring at the ground. Resignation is at war with rage in that face. Imprisoned by the Nazis…

Florida is not a naturally great place for an artist to do his or her work — the land is right, but the culture’s wrong — and that goes double as one moves away from the little pockets of civilization clinging to life along the coast. That is why the…

Neil LaBute became famous as a brutalizer of psyches, his characters’ and ours. His early plays, in the late 1990s, were all about the evils humans visit upon one another without provocation. They were studies in venality and cruelty, and it was hard to watch them without thinking that LaBute…

Yankee Tavern is a new play by Texan playwright Steven Dietz that proposes a universe where Occam’s razor rubs backward, and a boring, factual explanation of anything must be a lie. In Yankee Tavern, we might all be controlled by Lizard People, things not run by Lizard People are probably…