An L.A. "Defense"

Not to sound a monotonously boosterish note here, but amid the great news that the Lark Play Development Center's first "Playwrights of New York" (PONY) playwriting fellowship is going to go to Carson Kreitzer, I haven't seen mentioned the playwright's strong, dark, feminist play Self Defense (with the chillingly dismissive subtitle "the death of some salesmen"), which ran memorably at L.A.'s Actors' Gang in 2004 and provided an uncharacteristically meaty acting vehicle for the formidable Cynthia Ettinger. The piece was overshadowed for another reason: It was based on the heavily interpreted case of Aileen Wournos, the serial killer executed in 2002, which was also the subject of a few other media products around the same time.