Solo Show

British stage and screen veteran Ian McKellen, most widely known in recent years as Gandalf in "The Lord of the Rings" film trilogy, will perform a solo show, "A Knight Out in Los Angeles With Ian McKellen," Saturday and Sunday at the Freud Playhouse at UCLA.

Alice Johnson is a gamine actor with a lithe body, a rubber face and an engaging personality. However, the material in "St. Alice of Chattahoochee," Johnson's autobiographical solo show at the Elephant Theatre Lab, doesn't always measure up to the performer. The play briefly reprises Johnson's life, with a special emphasis on Johnson's eccentric Southern upbringing.

IN "Bridge & Tunnel," Sarah Jones' solo Broadway comedy, a Mrs. Lorraine Levine kicks off the poetry slam proceedings with a senior citizen jeremiad. Her hand fumbling with reading glasses, she prefaces the poem by recalling the anti-Semitism faced by her immigrant parents. "Thank God, times have changed," she says, "It may not be perfect, but we live in the best country in the world. Here in America we have freedom to say what we want, be what we want, to decide what happens in our country.

Karl Haendel's solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art is a facile rehash of an exhibition the museum presented in 1989. Seventeen years ago, "A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation" brought together works by 25 New Yorkers and five Angelenos more eager to comment on the difficulty of meaningful communication than to communicate meaningfully.

When Heather Raffo, an American daughter of an Iraqi-born father, entered Baghdad in 1993 for her first visit as an adult, a stern-looking border agent carefully examined her passport. His countenance wasn't surprising -- he was a representative of Saddam Hussein's government, two years after the United States bombed Baghdad in the first Gulf War. But the blond Raffo, who doesn't speak Arabic and whose mother's family is Irish American, found his first words extremely surprising.

"About four years ago, I had this seminal idea that the first night I took Ecstasy with my friend -- she changed my life. She showed me you can trust people." Justine Moore is recalling the genesis of "Ecstasy and the Ice Queen," her solo show about her teenage years. Although her words might sound a little starry-eyed, her show at the Promenade Playhouse in Santa Monica is no nostalgic wallow.

As she frankly admits in her solo show "More" at the Falcon, Yeardley Smith has always wanted "more" -- more from her family, more from her personal relationships but, most pressingly and pointedly, more from her acting career, a source of obsessive preoccupation throughout her life. Smith (and don't mispronounce her name. It's Yard-ley) had a long Broadway run in Tom Stoppard's "The Real Thing" while she was still in her teens and soon scored a starring role in the cult series "Herman's Head."

Julia SWEENEY'S solo show "Letting Go of God," which usually plays at Hollywood's Hudson Backstage Theatre on Friday and Saturday evenings and Sundays at 3 p.m., will not be presented on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, which both fall on a Friday. But Sweeney will perform it on Christmas and New Year's. The actress says the creative forces behind her skewering of organized religion thought: "How fun would it be to do it on Christmas -- a show that celebrates no God at all?"