Sara Hennessy

The story so far for the Furious Theatre Company brings to mind a soul music classic by Otis Redding: 2,000 miles they roamed, to make a loading dock their home. But unlike the lonely, bereft fellow bewailing a life gone wrong in Redding's "[Sittin' on] The Dock of the Bay," the six young, unheralded proprietors of the fledgling Furious troupe have been so awash in good luck leading up to this weekend's debut that they find it almost stunning.

The story so far for the Furious Theatre Company brings to mind a soul music classic by Otis Redding: 2,000 miles they roamed, to make a loading dock their home. But unlike the lonely, bereft fellow bewailing a life gone wrong in Redding's "[Sittin' on] The Dock of the Bay," the six young, unheralded proprietors of the fledgling Furious troupe have been so awash in good luck leading up to this weekend's debut that they find it almost stunning.

A neurotic suburban couple are held captive in their own home by relentless door-to-door salesmen who prey on their victims' insecurities. It's a premise ripe with possibilities, too many of which remain unrealized in "Chimps," an ambitious but frustrating effort that squanders some fine performances from Pasadena's Furious Theatre. The company collaborated with British playwright Simon Block to adapt his play's native setting and colloquialisms for an American theatergoer's palette.

One percenters, hide those offshore accounts: Occupy LA - or something a lot like it - has been spotted at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center.  The corruption of the privileged few is the comic target of Nikolai Gogol's “The Government Inspector,” now in an exuberant if overstated new adaptation by Oded Gross. We open on a scene that sounds suspiciously like a city council meeting in Bell: Mayor Anton (John Billingsley) alerts his cronies (Joe Fria, Alan Brooks, and Dana Kelly, Jr.)

Theater Noise--Alex Jones' slashing 1997 drama of the perils of economic depression frequently suggests a latter-day "Look Back in Anger." It begins with teenage factory worker Dan (Damaso Rodriquez) bringing pregnant bride Becky (Vonessa Martin) to their new home, a shoddy Black Country government housing flat (strikingly designed by Shawn Lee). The grimy comic atmosphere soon darkens, as blaring techno music from next door awakens the couple on their first night and thereafter.

If you think that getting in touch with your inner primitive is the ideal antidote to the sterility of modern civilization, San Francisco-based playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's "Hunter Gatherers" urges you to reconsider. In a razor-sharp staging from Furious Theatre Company, Nachtrieb's bitingly hilarious black comedy spares neither savages nor saints as a polite dinner party devolves into an orgy of pent-up rage, sex and bloodshed. An exotic gourmet meal is the annual tradition with which two 35-year-old couples celebrate their enduring friendship, but this year chef Richard (Doug Newell)

The Furious Theatre Company, an up-and-coming group that has recently staged two well-regarded U.S. premieres, tests its creative mettle on a classic in "The Playboy of the Western World" at the Armory Northwest in Pasadena. It's hard to believe that John Millington Synge's fiercely poetic comedy occasioned riots when first produced by the Abbey Theatre in 1907.

Questions of faith and science tend to polarize around predictable rhetoric, but Craig Wright's "Grace" brings refreshing -- though far from reassuring -- complexity to what is fast becoming the most urgent philosophical issue of our time. A former Methodist seminarian turned writer for stage ("Recent Tragic Events") and TV ("Six Feet Under"), Wright spins rigorous theological inquiry with an accomplished dramatist's flair.

Echoes of John Osborne permeate "Noise," receiving its U.S. premiere by the Furious Theatre in Pasadena. Alex Jones' slashing 1997 drama of the perils of economic depression frequently suggests a latter-day "Look Back in Anger." It begins with teenage factory worker Dan (Damaso Rodriquez) bringing pregnant bride Becky (Vonessa Martin) to their new home, a shoddy Black Country government housing flat (strikingly designed by Shawn Lee).

The title of "The God Botherers" at the Furious Theatre Company refers to those who forcibly impose their beliefs on others. As such, Richard Bean's 2003 London hit is a topical take on foreign aid workers in a chaotic Third World nation. The setting is the fictional African country of Tambia, whose population is either Muslim or Christian, though other sects persist.

"You stepped over the line." Those words, which begin "The Shape of Things," supply the first clue to Neil LaBute's dark comic take on the subjectivity of surface truth. In its Los Angeles County premiere, this icily effective Furious Theatre mounting hides sober motives behind a hip, cynical facade. A London smash in its 2001 Almeida Theatre premiere, "Shape of Things" moved to Broadway, then became a LaBute-directed 2003 film.