Pamela Gien

Actress Pamela Gien did not want to remember the sad times of her childhood in South Africa. She did not want to remember the injustices she saw or the tragedy that struck her family there. But after being ignored for three decades, those memories rose sharply to the surface in a Los Angeles acting class exercise. Vibrant and malleable, they took shape first as improv, then as a written performance and finally as a play that has now traveled to New York and London and home again.

"The Syringa Tree," Pamela Gien's one-woman show now at the Pasadena Playhouse, is said to have begun as an exercise in a Los Angeles acting class taught by the show's director, Larry Moss. The exercise involved turning to another student in the class and telling a personal story. Gien summoned up a haunting personal tale from her childhood in South Africa, and the seed of "The Syringa Tree" was planted.

"The Syringa Tree," Pamela Gien's one-woman show now at the Pasadena Playhouse, is said to have begun as an exercise in a Los Angeles acting class taught by the show's director, Larry Moss. The exercise involved turning to another student in the class and telling a personal story. Gien summoned up a haunting personal tale from her childhood in South Africa, and the seed of "The Syringa Tree" was planted.

Actress Pamela Gien did not want to remember the sad times of her childhood in South Africa. She did not want to remember the injustices she saw or the tragedy that struck her family there. But after being ignored for three decades, those memories rose sharply to the surface in a Los Angeles acting class exercise. Vibrant and malleable, they took shape first as improv, then as a written performance and finally as a play that has now traveled to New York and London and home again.

Discovering a new play can be a thrill, even if the buzz wears off before intermission. The Padua Hills Playwrights' Festival heightens that thrill by asking theatergoers to promenade from play to play, setting each work on a different, impromptu, unexpected, usually outdoor stage. You've heard of found art. This is found staging. The festival itself is also itinerant, changing location each summer. It has just landed at the USC campus, where it offers six new plays in two evenings.

When Tennessee Williams' "The Night of the Iguana" was first produced on Broadway in December, 1961, it was voted Best American Play of the season, and a couple of critics even ventured that it was Williams' best play. Such proclamations are dangerously self-serving, but watching and, more to the point perhaps, listening to the revival of this play at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, where it opened Thursday, one is awed by the sheer beauty and nourishment in the writing.

The most anticipated autumn event in Southern California theater isn't a particular play; it's the unveiling of the new South Coast Repertory campus in Costa Mesa. Opening Nov. 8 will be the 336-seat Julianne Argyros Stage, with a traditional proscenium, a balcony and boxes, a back row only 39 feet from the stage and Richard Greenberg's new "The Violet Hour." The company's other two theaters have been refurbished.

Four Los Angeles dramatists -- Jon Robin Baitz, Lynn Manning, Alec Mapa and Luis Alfaro -- will have works produced in 2003 at Seattle's ACT Theatre. Robert Egan is bringing the L.A. bouquet as he transplants himself from producing director of the Mark Taper Forum to his new job as artistic director at ACT.

To a classical musician, accelerando means speed it up, but only in music, not in life. The word holds richer potency for a ballet dancer recovering from a broken foot, intent on finding true love by dawn on this particular New Year's Eve.

Shem Bitterman is a young man to watch, if only to make sure that he works just a little harder at creating his realities on stage and digs a little deeper than he is digging right now. Bitterman's "The Ramp," which opened Saturday at South Coast Repertory, treads on slippery ground. Skates might even be the better verb to use. This co-runner-up in SCR's 2nd annual new play Calfest (with Octavio Solis, who wrote the previously reviewed "Man of the Flesh"), has taken on a tough subject.

Shem Bitterman is a young man to watch, if only to make sure that he works just a little harder at creating his realities on stage and digs a little deeper than he is digging right now. Bitterman's "The Ramp," which opened Saturday at South Coast Repertory, treads on slippery ground. Skates might even be the better verb to use. The co-runner-up (with Octavio Solis, who wrote the previously reviewed "Man of the Flesh") in SCR's second annual new play Calfest has taken on a tough subject.