Sunday, October 16, 1892Thomas Smallcomb got the news around 11:00 p.m. Trouble up at the Geyser’s. A double murder. The deputy constable flicked the reins and steered his two-horse buckboard east on Otay Valley Road. …

“It is not my intention to give away the plot, but I think I die in the end.”

When I see the name Moises Kaufman linked to a project I circle the date at once. He’s been involved with some of the most thorough, serious, and moving pieces in recent years: The Laramie …

First things first. Barry Edelstein, the Old Globe’s new artistic director, has begun his tenure with what amounts to a position statement: do not expect the safe, commercial fare of the previous administration. Though the …

John Donne said “no man is an island.” Playwright Samuel D. Hunter’s world premiere disagrees. Matthew, QZ, and Bryan live sealed-off, isolated lives, though a thousand miles from any ocean. More to the point, they’re …

After an announcement by Roswell Army Air Field commander Col. William Blanchard that a “flying saucer” had been “captured,” there was immediate rebuke by his superiors. The press followed in discrediting the existence of UFOs. Quickly, reports of UFOs dropped off; those that were reported were ridiculed.

Lamb’s Players is currently staging Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Wit. A major character never comes on stage. But he hovers over it like a severe, yet benevolent angel. Before Vivian Bearing was diagnosed with stage-four …

“Unaccompanied women smoking at the opera, that sort of thing?”

A look back on the Fourth of July weekend of 1947, when reports of UFOs went viral!

I know people who’ve vowed never to see the 1967 movie again. Even though they know what’s coming: just when you think it’s safe at 27B Grogan Street, Greenwich Village, Alan Arkin’s full profile dives …

Cornerstone We’ve been hired to work at the world’s most important power plant, in the center of civilization. We will be responsible not just for providing energy to the masses but also for the air …

Seafoam Sleepwalk. The Scripps Institute of Oceanography has catalogued countless species of marine life. But they have never - and will never again after this coming Sunday - witnessed who emerges from the whitewater at …

On 1947’s Fourth of July weekend, 500 people per day reported seeing UFOs…and we’re talking all over the country, not just flaky-nutty Southern California.

Some definitions: Harlem Renaissance: a flourishing of African-American art centered on, but not exclusive to, Harlem. Begun in the 1920s, it included writing by Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, and innovative music by Duke …

There are probably plays as funny, though I doubt there’s one funnier than Oscar Wilde’s “trivial comedy for serious people.” The jokes flow like ocean waves, in sets of three, with the third the capper. …

When he was a “little kid, maybe five or six,” Christopher Ashley watched a man on ice skates at Rockefeller Center. As he skated, the man recited a poem and the blades clacked out the …

A preview of coming attractions at the La Jolla Playhouse’s Without Walls Festival (October 3-6). You could almost say the festival stages plays anywhere but in a theater. The plays are one-acts. Most run less …

It’s too bad they don’t give a Craig Noel Award for Audience of the Year. I sat in a sure nominee recently at OnStage. High school students packed the house. They hung on every word …

They tell writers never talk about an idea or what you’re working on. The superstition, a favorite of Hemingway’s: some writing only happens once. And not even at a computer or in a notebook. Voice …

I’ve always been wary of theatrical biographies of famous people. Too often they assume you already know, say, James Joyce or Ludwig Van B., Ty Cobb or Rosa Parks. So the bios skip past the …

Conor McPherson’s The Shining City takes some amazing theatrical risks. No, wait, make that anti-theatrical. Imagine the exact opposite of a blockbuster movie: frantic cuts, pulse-drubbing pace, blaring sounds that belt you daffy. Shining City …

According to tour guide Lettice Douffet, Fustian House is inaptly named. “Fustian” means “turgid,” “bombastic,” and “pretentious” speech or writing. Lettice says it’s the blandest, gloomiest, 16th century building in Britain. So she decides to …

One of the most frustrating parts of my job is watching a top notch cast, backed by a polished trio of musicians, performing on an inventive set – and the material doesn’t come near their …

Teatro Mascara Magica’s Detained in the Desert runs through this weekend. The compelling play is about undocumented immigrants, a subject so vital they say the only way to see it fully is to be there. …

On June 23, 1947, pilot Richard Rankin saw a fleet of ten aircraft that became known as the first “flying saucers.”

A composer hands a chorus line dancer a box full of musical scores – most of them rejects – and says, “do what you can.” The songs have something to do with love: longing for, …

One of the hottest shows of the recent San Diego Fringe Festival will have an all-too brief return run this weekend. The two-character story, by Charlene Baldridge, and the staging by Circle Circle dot dot’s …

It’s always a relief when license plates with Saguaro cacti exodus east this time of year. Our roads thin out, like arteries purged of cholesterol. But Teatro Mascara Magica’s staging a play all Zonies should …

Field Notes: Fifty, 100, even 200 years after a historical event, you can get the feel of a place just by being there. Stand at the ruins on Presidio Hill, for example. Erase all the …

Somewhere in the Cuyamacas there’s a box canyon wide enough to include 50 armed men on horseback and tall enough to conceal at least 200 Kumeyaay warriors lying in wait around the rim. But try …

No comedian gets to his inner child faster, or stays longer, than Mel Brooks. “There are no rules,” says the self-annointed psychiatrist in Brooks’s 2000-Year-old Man album. “A hundred years from now, they’ll decide what …

Okay. The stage will be bare. We’ll need a leather-like club chair: classy but mobile and able to take a pounding, since it’ll roll on and off often. Also, it must have wide and tall …

In the Heights at San Diego Rep Sam Woodhouse (director), Javier Velasco (choreographer) and at least half of San Diego – or so it would seem – have turned the San Diego Rep’s Lyceum Stage …

Except for two tall, A-frame ladders, two small balconies, and a solitary light bulb, the stage for Lamb’s Players is bare. Even the coal-black rear wall is exposed. Take away the balconies and Michael McKeon’s …

For seven years, Calvin Manson, artistic director of the Ira Aldridge Repertory, interviewed people unused to tape recorders and probing questions: the homeless, the bullied, the racially profiled. To enter their world he disguised himself …

What do the following have in common: Alan Arkin, Melinda Dillon, Barbara Harris, Peter Boyle, Joan Rivers? Can’t say? Okay here’s a clue. What do they have in common with John Belushi, Bill Murray, Dan …

They got caught, the lover got the chair, and Cain got a darn good story.

The Rep has opened its 38th season with a spectacular production of the Tony Award-winning musical. The evening seems to grow with every song. In fact, after a while when one tough act to follow …

In 1927, Ruth Snyder, a woman in Queens, persuaded her lover, Judd Gray, to kill her husband so they could collect the insurance, which had a double indemnity clause for accidental death. Snyder and Gray …

They’re wedded to avoidance behavior, abetted by gallons of vino fino.

Okay, N. Richard Nash's pluvicultural comedy has a woman reinventing herself during the Depression on the far side of nowhere. And it premiered during the sexism-clogged McCarthy Era at that. But this is one slight …

Maybe the most produced play in San Diego this side of A Christmas Carol. We've seen everything from high-caloric cutsie to Jack O'Brien's magical 1985 staging — David Ogden Stiers and Katherine McGrath as a …

Like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, they only exist between the footlights and the proscenium.

Eliza Jane Schneider always had a fascination with dialects and has an impressive list of vocal credits, including many of the female characters on the TV show "South Park" and some of the fish in …

"As a country, we're quite sick," the authors say on page four. Less than 20 pages later I realized that this must be one of the - if not the - most radical books I …

Miles Anderson does amazing things as Shylock in the Old Globe’s Merchant of Venice, but his most understated choice sets the tone of the play. Bassanio wants to wed Portia, “a lady richly left/ And …

Ben Hecht was a writer’s writer. He won the first Academy Award for a screenplay (Underworld, 1927). He rewrote the first nine reels of Gone with the Wind in seven days. He wrote 35 books …

Lamb’s Players’ Fiddler on the Roof is one of the best shows they’ve ever done. Ever. The title comes from a wall painting Marc Chagall did for the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre in 1920. He …

She flits about like a sand flea, never in one place, or one state of mind, for long.

YP-346 Goes to WarVincent Battaglia, machinist mate of Yard Patrol boat 346, never wore dog-tags in the engine room. No one did. Tropical heat made them so white hot they’d brand you. But on the …