Featured Column

"The total installation costs are $2.5 [million] including the production of the merchandise line and I’ve raised $400k to date. Yes it’s a shareholder project. When I started the project, I was in contact with some sponsors, but they wanted to have a huge influence in the actual artwork so I decided to go a new way. I’ve worked with sponsors ever since I started making art and never took money from the state or city because I wanted to stay independent. Well, today sponsors have changed their rules and use art as a marketing tool."-- visual artist Hans Peter Trauschke BY PAULINE ADAMEK

"Plagiarism is like pregnancy. Whether you know you’re getting pregnant or not, it doesn’t matter. Once you are pregnant, it is an undeniable state of affairs. Intention has very little to do with it. And that has been ever true. And it particularly has to be true now, with the Internet, when it’s so easy to lift words, sentences and paragraphs wholesale."-- playwright Steven Drukman BY DEBORAH KLUGMAN

Much of the 20-day shoot took place in Rancho Palos Verdes at a property that once belonged to Fuller’s grandmother; the remaining Southern California locations were obtained gratis through favors called in. Among the challenges they dealt with were climbing down to Thousand Steps Beach in Laguna with their equipment for the “worst day of shooting,” having to “hold for peacock” during shots because the birds that roamed the RPV property had exquisite timing, and a silk lighting screen that nearly fell onto Sofranko during a windstorm. BY MAYANK KESHAVIAH

Perhaps the medium is both the problem and the solution when it comes to making Shakespeare relevant. Could this show, which feels a bit like "Glee" but with fewer misfits and more cutthroat competition, introduce Shakespeare to the latest crop of web-savvy not-so-literati? Could a desire to get the in-jokes motivate media-hungry youngsters to put down their phones and learn to navigate iambic pentameter with the same adroitness as their Facebook privacy settings? BY JENNY LOWER

L.A. playwright Alice Tuan's "Hit" is currently playing at Los Angeles Theatre Center. Through her life and career, Tuan has been trying to reconcile what it means to be of Chinese ancestry in America. "Hit" is one expression of that attempt, a play, like its L.A. setting, with many centers. BY LOVELL ESTELL III

In his new column about theater beyond theater walls, TERRY MORGAN looks at Acorn.tv's "Theatreland," an eight-part series about the Royal Theatre Haymarket, and its productions of "Waiting for Godot" (with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen) and "Breakfast at Tiffany's"

On the night of the L.A. Weekly Theater Awards, while sitting at his North Hollywood theater with a social media dashboard, a phone, a laptop and five Twitter accounts -- he was also in the middle of running auditions at the time -- Gregory Crafts and his team got the hashtag #LAThtrAwards to trend with well over a million impressions. Crafts tells the story of how they did it, and why it matters.

BY MINDY FARABEE The annals of dance have all but passed over Bernice Harrison, despite the 10 years she spent as a standout among the 35 members of the First Negro Classic Ballet (FNCB), a pioneering early 20th century company here in Los Angeles. This is the little known story of FNCB, an exalted dance company whose performers did their art after work. They performed internationally, and have been largely forgotten by history.

May 17 is L.A. Stage Day: an all-day symposium on the art, craft and marketing of theater, organized by L.A. Stage Alliance and hosted by California State University, Los Angeles. -- By Pauline Adamek

Critic-director-playwright Charles Marowitz has died. By Steven Leigh Morris