The best Los Angeles theater of 2015

We Baby Boomers have never been able to get that theme song out of our heads (“There you go, Astro Boy / On your flight into space”). Playwright Natsu Onoda Power vividly depicts the career of Astro’s creator Osamu Tezuka, a profound humanist with a touching vision of world peace. Under Jaime Robledo’s direction, the scrappy Sacred Fools company executed startling manga and anime effects with admirable economy of means.

In 2015’s best world-premiere play, doting parents discover on Christmas Eve that their college student son will that night enter the slammer on a charge of raping a co-ed. During 60 real-time minutes, writer-director Marja-Lewis Ryan wound up the suspense like a steel spring, sending the characters through a full spectrum of emotions from denial to outrage, while we were left to question assumptions about everyday decency and the stability of the American home.

Martin Sherman’s 1979 drama holds a special place among Holocaust dramatizations in its searing examination of homosexuals’ treatment under the Third Reich. For its first major U.S. revival in 35 years, director Moisés Kaufman commissioned from designer Beowulf Boritt a giant “machine for actors” of platforms and ramps, its very versatility suggesting the mechanisms which were destined to cart millions to their doom. An inevitably political evening became a memorably emotional one as well.

A highlight of the uncurated, anything-goes Fest, in its sixth year, was this gem from the improbably-named The Interrobang Departure. In Sam Hunter’s adaptation of a David Garnett fable, a vixen of a wife literally transforms into a vixen, teaching both spouses about love’s limits. Audiences sat on cushions around a dimly lit playing area, as a trio of sublimely shape-shifting actors reminded us of the endlessly seductive power of story.