courtesy of iTheatre Collaborative

Kristina Rogers and Peter Ross Stephens in Gruesome Playground Injuries

The simplest things are the most difficult. When your options are limited, when there are only so many choices to make, one misstep is a glaring note of dissonance. Little mistakes are comparatively easy to hide in an epic extravaganza. In something like a plain roast chicken or an ikebana arrangement, perfection is more of a challenge but also more of a triumph.

That's one of the alluring things about iTheatre's current production of Gruesome Playground Injuries by Rajiv Joseph, who also wrote Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

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courtesy of Th [sic] Sense

At first, I wasn't sure that Th [sic] Sense: No Class! has any sort of seasonal theme (not that I need my sketch comedy compilation shows to have a theme of any kind). But I couldn't discern anything about the weather being crappy or school being out (or bad blockbuster films or lamesauce grill-based holidays, or whatever summer means to you).

Now, though, as I look at the list of sketches on the show's program, I realize there was a lot of wetness. A lot of pee and poop and semen and lady-cum, a bit of saliva and, as a bonus, a sketch by Portia Beacham that features pudding, condiments, ice cream cake, and Tabasco. And keeping wet is a great way to keep cool -- not just disgusting!

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courtesy of Orange Theatre Group

A lot of experimental theater is quite sociopolitical in its messages, be they overt or subtle. Chris Danowski, whose plays are mostly on the not-your-father's-Oldsmobile side, has indeed written plays like that, which are critical and thought-provoking, while still funny and entertaining (FrogWoman, for instance, which despite everything is the most linear of his works that I've seen).

But as far as I can tell, Danowski is more attuned to human microrelations -- to one-on-one conversations, subconscious mysteries, and the desperately urgent messages of poetry and romance that are never entirely understood no matter how many ways we try to express them. Sometimes it seems as though, as a writer, he doesn't even necessarily prefer that that's the case, just as, as an audience member, you might not, either. It simply is.

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courtesy of Desert Rose Theatre

Carson Saline as Dorian Gray

I know I've lost an arm-wrestling match with a classic piece of literature if I can easily follow a story from beginning to end and don't feel confused, yet just can't shake that feeling of not knowing what the big effing deal was. But you know you've been lucky enough to stumble upon an excellent theater experience when such a story is brought to life in a way that keeps you thinking about it nevertheless. And if it the whole thing happens in a mysterious under-construction resurrection of an outlet mall with security gates clanking down and electric drills and sanders running all through the first act, somebody's going to Heaven for sure, as my mother-in-law sometimes asserts.

Katherine Stewart, an excellent actor and director who co-founded Desert Rose Theatre in 2005, was gracious and upbeat in the curtain speech for her adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray as she welcomed us to her company's third venue so far this season. I'm confident that if the whole enterprise that is Mesa's Power Square Mall doesn't go under by next fall, things will keep looking up, and it certainly can't be any worse than last season's DRT roost between a piano store and some lady who scheduled live children's storytime during the troupe's performances. In the meantime, sit close to the playing area, grab the available blankets until the A/C gets fine-tuned, and enjoy a company that's devoted to the classics and wins awards for a reason.

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Laura Durant

Clockwise from top left: Dion Foreman, Joseph A. Gaxiola, Wes Hart, Bronwyn Schile, Tyler Pounds, and James Asimenios wrestle with their inner demons in The Golden Gays.

Oy, where to start? Well, first, for the sake of clarity, Soul Invictus' The Golden Gays is not presented by our beloved AZ Gender Outlaws -- so, for example, it's neither the same show nor the same performers as this word-for-word drag re-enactment of an episode of The Golden Girls.

Whether that makes you more or less anxious to see it is not our problem. But it's a brand-new play, including parody musical production numbers, with a whole lot of dresses on a handful (I wish, right?) of men. Much of its pedigree comes from members of Th [sic] Sense sketch comedy troupe and other Soul Invictus (and old @Pro) shows, like the people who brought us Head: The Musical, so when you're floored by gob-smackingly stunning jokes, visual humor from left field or farther, and characters so richly quirky you have to believe in them, you'll know whom to blame.

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courtesy of Duane Daniels

Jenny Strickland and BC Verhoeven kill a little time while dreaming of Australia.

Subject matter isn't one of the generally accepted elements of drama (such as plot, character, theme, and dialogue) that we've ticked off on our fingers since classical times -- maybe because every play has it, and excellence doesn't really depend on exactly what it is. But it is an attribute that helps identify a show and make it easy to get worked up about, if that's your thing: e.g., the pregnant nun show, the draft-dodging hippie show, the nude horse-blinding show.

Karin Diann Williams' Australia , currently at Space 55, is "about" teenagers in what appear to be traditional, inexorable, downward spirals -- young people who never finish what they start, whether it's high school, a stint in the Marines, a robbery, a murder, a marriage, a baby, or even a cigarette. But what keeps it from being just another dismal "kids with problems" play is tongue-in-cheek comedy of several flavors, from the dark to the absurd to the bravely character-based.

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It's not an easy time to be a resident of Arizona. The jokes our politicians try to pass off as laws are making us the butt of comedy writers everywhere. (Guns on campus? Seriously? Who thinks that's a good idea? Comedy writers, that's who.)

But there ARE good things about Arizona, things that can help take our mind off the bad, and one of them is the amount of quality young adult fiction the state produces. I'm not talking about the Twilight series, either, about which more than enough has already been said. I'm talking about book's like Robin Brande's Evolution, Me and Other Freaks of Nature, Amy Fellner Dominy's OyMG, and Tom Leveen's Party.

Party, which came out last April, was Leveen's first book; it told the story, from multiple perspectives, of 11 teenagers all going to the same party in Santa Barbara one night. With Party, Leveen proved that he could convincingly inhabit different characters, and write from both the male and female point of view.

Now Leveen is back with a new YA novel, Zero, which he'll unveil at a launch party at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe on April 24.

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John Groseclose

Amanda Melby (left) and Maria Amorocho in Body Awareness

It's no one's fault but my own (okay, and maybe that of the design of Actors Theatre's promo poster below) that I'd really hoped Annie Baker's Body Awareness would delve deeply into the topic of body acceptance even while being funny, moving, and well-acted.

It doesn't in particular. For example, although the character Phyllis, a psychology professor, starts to talk about the male gaze, she almost immediately gets confused and then needs to leave the stage -- partly because she's unsuccessfully thinking out loud about a largely private matter in public and partly because, at that moment, she's really only there to introduce a Body Awareness Week performance event, such as a Palestinian child refugee dance company or Vermont's premier biracial troubadour couple.

And that's not a deficiency in the script -- the issue of looksism in our culture and how those who are objectified respond to it is not the play's job to analyze, let alone to resolve. Even though Baker's Circle Mirror Transformation from last season took place at an acting class, and its events were driven by the class, I realize, looking back, that it wasn't literally about acting. It was about people and, in a way, about accepting every bit of them (which, if you're being generous, should include their bodies), and not merely in the way good actors do.

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photo by Claire Lawton

It was a humid, soggy weekend for Art Detour 24. And the weather was as unpredictable as the artwork.

The weekend, officially organized by Downtown non-profit Artlink, is two days of studio tours and gallery openings (we'd argue that it should have included the night of Third Friday, but more on that later). Traditionally, the event is a chance for local artists to show the public what they've been working on and hopefully reach a wider audience than the monthly First or Third Fridays.

Our impressions from the weekend: A lot of artists have given up on the annual event. And perhaps it's time (really) for Artlink to either seriously rethink the purpose of the weekend or toss in the towel as well.

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In the introduction to his new book of essays, "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams" (University of Minnesota Press), Mark Dery lays out the foundation that shores up every one of these short, sharp, well-turned pieces: American Gothic, as epitomized by director David Lynch in the movie Blue Velvet.More >>