Review

“What else is there for a woman but l'amour ?” wistfully muses a character in Clare Boothe Luce's “The Women,” in a good-humored revival at Theatre West. “Well, there's a little corn whiskey left,” retorts another.  Luce's waspish dialogue, which relentlessly punctures the self-delusions of her delightfully and variously odious women, may account for the perpetual popularity of her 1936 play (and the 1939 George Cukor film based on it, which stars a Who's Who of 1930s actresses: Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Paulette Goddard - you name her, she's in it)

In the desert, Nicolas Shake piles up old tires, dried palm fronds, mounds of dirt, wooden pallets, old car parts and other stuff scavenged from remote roadsides then decorates them with colored lights. As night falls the makeshift, temporary sculptures are photographed, the resulting prints becoming permanent records of an ephemeral art. In Shake's five photographs at Western Project, the slow slide between daylight and darkness underscores the transitory nature of the subject, which is an art conceived as something with a fragile life span rather than being timeless or eternal.

"Bloom," a compact show of eight recent painted sculptures by Christopher Miles, takes its name seriously. The flowering at hand is excitement over the extreme, hybrid nature of contemporary experience. These artistic mutts celebrate incongruity, heterogeneity and multiplicity -- even if irradiated with a certain creepiness, which certainly feels right for our time. The works are on view in the rear project-room at the Pasadena Museum of California Art in a show organized by artist Constance Mallinson.

Including the American Revolution, the United States has participated in 12 major wars since the republic was founded. All but two were photographed. (The Mexican-American War of 1846-48 was the first to be documented with cameras, but just a few pictures survive.) The industrialization of war has logically coincided with the rise of machines that produce images. Because of the camera's 1839 invention, it is a peculiarity of our nation's relatively youthful history that war photography characterizes a substantial subset of the photojournalist's art. At the Annenberg Space for Photography, a large, fascinating and often heartbreaking exhibition is the first major survey of the genre.

Collages with the material heft of sculptures and sculptures with the two-dimensional articulation of flat drawings characterize Florian Morlat's engagingly strange show at Cherry and Martin. (The show is the first of a two-part exhibition, the second installment opening June 8.) The palette is dominated by the red-black-white seriousness of Constructivist art, with its early 20th century emphasis on theory in service of productive revolution, while the gawky eccentricity of the forms is more in keeping with the tactile seductions of participatory sculpture by the late Franz West.

After a lengthy battle, Los Angeles Police Department detectives and prosecutors have decades-old audiotapes that could shed new light on other cases potentially connected to the Charles Manson killing rampage. LAPD Cmdr. Andrew Smith said the department's elite Robbery-Homicide Division, along with Los Angeles County prosecutors, are starting to review the tapes of conversations between one of Charles Manson's most fervent followers and his late attorney to see whether they can help solve more cases from that period.

LONDON - British authorities on Thursday began combing through their intelligence files and evidence from the attack site to determine whether the apparently terrorism-related killing of a young soldier on a London street could have been prevented. As political and community leaders vowed not to be cowed by the vicious assault, Scotland Yard announced the arrest of two additional suspects. A man and a woman, both 29, were held on suspicion of conspiring to murder. Investigators gave no further information.

WASHINGTON - President Obama said Thursday he was troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may "chill" investigative journalism and said he had asked Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. to review Justice Department guidelines for going after reporters or their records. "Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs. Our focus must be on those who break the law," Obama said, referring to those who leak secret information. The statement seemed to mark a departure for the president, who has been particularly determined to investigate those in his administration who leak national security information to reporters.

There are many ways of being a political playwright. Christopher Shinn's approach, centered on characters rather than on ideologies, is one that will never go out of style. Illuminating large-scale public concerns through the microscopic examination of individual behavior, Shinn finds political meaning in psychological patterns. In plays such as "Four" and "Where Do We Live" (to my mind, the most resonant theatrical response to 9/11), he has shown how the conduct of our nation is reflected in our most intimate relationships.

Shakespearean in dimension and craft, “The Crucible,” Arthur Miller's 1953 play about the Salem witch trials, is inarguably a masterwork.  More arguably, it's over-produced. How, then, does a director bring new immediacy to this beloved yet familiar work - Miller's sly denunciation of the McCarthy hearings, cloaked in period garb?  Leave it to the creative team at Antaeus. The company's subtly revisionist production of the play, co-directed by Armin Shimerman and Geoffrey Wade, reinvigorates the language and brings a novel dimension to Miller's well-worn text.  The production is double-cast and multiethnic, but for Antaeus that's nothing new. And casting a woman - in this instance, effectively magisterial Ann Noble - as the Rev. John Hale, is a bold twist that works nicely, to be sure.  But the boldest innovation is having the performers face dead front for the bulk of the action rather than directly addressing one another.