Love Triangle

Rob Morrow co-wrote, directed and stars in "Maze," and the appeal of the do-it-yourself project is obvious. Morrow plays the title character, Lyle Maze, an artist with Tourette's syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder, conditions that give the actor plenty of opportunities to do some showy work. In fact, Morrow the writer makes sure that Morrow the actor has so many chances to chew up scenery that it's a little hard sometimes to get past the vanity nature of the project. What makes "Maze" sweetly palatable is that Morrow landed actress Laura Linney to play the woman at the center of the movie's love triangle.

Q: I am a 22-year-old college graduate with big dreams. My only problem is this love triangle I have put myself in for the past five years. At the age of 15 I met this young girl who was clean, smart, beyond beautiful, trustworthy – and to top it off, I was her first sex partner. We spent a lot of time together during my teenage years and I started to get bored with her. I put her through a lot of hurt and BS, but she still stood by my side. At age 17, I met another very pretty girl.

What's an audience to do when asked to care about characters who offer no reason to give them a second thought? That's the question raised by The Credeaux Canvas , Keith Bunin's play about an amoral young man, his girlfriend, his roommate - an unfathomable, hermitlike art student - and the rich woman they try to swindle. Theatre Horizon is staging the play at the Centre Theater in Norristown, where it's one of the relatively few suburban events included in the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts.

Your video store has three suggestions this week to brighten your new year: a thriller from George Romero, an East-West actioner and a sexy drama that combines love and politics. MONKEY SHINES (1988) (Orion) $89.98. 113 minutes. Jason Beghe, John Pankow, Joyce Van Patten. Risky and triumphant experiment in psychological terror directed by George (Night of the Living Dead) Romero. About the eerie interdependence of an accident victim and a capuchin monkey, the quadriplegic's equivalent of a guide dog. In this movie that gives a new twist to the expression "monkey on my back," the primate is not only the helping arms and legs of her master, but starts acting out the quadriplegic's frustrated rage.

BROWNSVILLE, PA. - A 35-year-old western Pennsylvania man has been charged in the fatal beating of a 75-year-old man allegedly stemming from a love triangle involving the younger man's 20-something girlfriend. Jonathan Godines, of Brownsville, was originally charged with aggravated assault and lesser charges in the Nov. 15 beating of John Eicholtz. Fayette County authorities say Eicholtz, also of Brownsville, died Dec. 1. Authorities on Wednesday filed a new set of charges, including criminal homicide, based on autopsy results that linked Eicholtz's fatal brain hemorrhage to the assault.

A love triangle ended in a hail of gunfire that left one man critically wounded last night inside a Kensington bodega, police said. About 8:15 p.m., a man clad in black stepped inside Guzman Grocery, at E and Clearfield streets, and opened fire. police spokesman Lt. Frank Vanore said. Three bullets struck a 30-year-old man who recently began dating the gunman's ex-girlfriend, Vanore said. The victim was admitted to Temple University Hospital in critical condition. The gunman fled on foot through nearby McPherson Square Park, Vanore said.

If you don't count the exquisite cinematography, there is precisely one reason to see the convoluted Chinese love story Zhou Yu's Train. Her name is Gong Li, and she is a creature of ravishing and evanescent beauty. No matter the role, she is always dressed in mystery and moonlight. Cinephiles will recognize Ms. Li as the voluptuous dazzler of Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern and Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine, a woman whose sleepy eyes and pillow lips suggest the need for only one room in the house.

A decorous, respectable adaptation of Sara Gruen's engaging bestseller, "Water for Elephants" would have come more excitingly alive with stronger doses of Depression-era grit and sexual spunk. The 1931 circus setting and a love triangle involving three exceedingly attractive people provides a constant wash of scenic pleasure and the film's fidelity to its source will receive nodding approval from the book's many fans, which should result in solid, if unspectacular commercial results for this Fox release.

Menage, a saucy comedy of sexual manners, laces its laughs with bitter jokes and pungent wit. Written and directed by Bertrand Blier, whose Oscar-winning Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (1978) was about a dissatisfied wife in love with a 12-year-old boy, Menage features an equally unhappily married woman. Shrewish Monique, disgusted with her spineless, jobless mouse of a husband, Antoine, sells him for the price of a bath and a new silk slip. The buyer is an oxlike hustler named Bob. Bob adores Antoine, who is smitten with Monique, who has the hots for, you guessed it, Bob. As far as love triangles go, and this one goes the limit, Menage combines the breathless mirth of Noel Coward's Design for Living with the heavy-breathing farce of Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot. Its difference - and Blier's triumph - is that it does not play its love triangle merely for laughs.

One of the mantras of the musical theater work The Mystery of Love has to do with the bandstand. The members of a hard-working rhythm-and-blues band regard the bandstand as a mythological place, where "dreamers come to project their dreams. " Lead singer Shine (an understated, fine portrayal by Robert Tyree) and singer/manager Maceo (Ramon Melindez Moses) believe in the transformations that occur there: When they tell each other "anything can happen on the bandstand," they mean it in the most positive, musical sense.

Q: I am a 22-year-old college graduate with big dreams. My only problem is this love triangle I have put myself in for the past five years. At the age of 15 I met this young girl who was clean, smart, beyond beautiful, trustworthy – and to top it off, I was her first sex partner. We spent a lot of time together during my teenage years and I started to get bored with her. I put her through a lot of hurt and BS, but she still stood by my side. At age 17, I met another very pretty girl.

PITTSBURGH — If you think Shakespeare's works have been performed so often there's not much left to do with them, think again. No one has ever filmed readings of all 154 sonnets by a succession of actors and nonactors in evocative locations around the world, and presented them in the order Shakespeare published them in 1609. Someone is doing it now, however: Jeff Monahan, president of 72nd St. Films in Manhattan and Connellsville, Pa., and Joanna Lowe, founder of Cup-A-Jo Productions in Pittsburgh.

BROWNSVILLE, PA. - A 35-year-old western Pennsylvania man has been charged in the fatal beating of a 75-year-old man allegedly stemming from a love triangle involving the younger man's 20-something girlfriend. Jonathan Godines, of Brownsville, was originally charged with aggravated assault and lesser charges in the Nov. 15 beating of John Eicholtz. Fayette County authorities say Eicholtz, also of Brownsville, died Dec. 1. Authorities on Wednesday filed a new set of charges, including criminal homicide, based on autopsy results that linked Eicholtz's fatal brain hemorrhage to the assault.

SACRAMENTO, CALIF. - A 73-year-old gunman entangled in a love triangle killed the treasurer of a remote-controlled airplane club who police said was having an affair with the estranged wife of the attacker. Before turning the gun on himself Tuesday, Robert Gully tried to shoot the woman but failed to hit her, Sacramento police Sgt. Andrew Pettit said. - Associated Press

Expressing regret and quoting Shakespeare, a Chester County Court judge declared a mistrial in a murder case Friday after three full days of testimony. Judge Thomas G. Gavin said a witness' recounting of a derogatory comment made about the defendant, Morgan M. Mengel, by her father would likely prevent her from getting a fair trial. Mengel, a 36-year-old West Goshen Township mother of three, is accused of conspiring with her lover, Stephen Shappell, 22, of Broomall, to kill her husband, Kevin Mengel Jr., 33, on June 17, 2010.

NEW YORK - Eight years after he died of prostate cancer, Johnny Ramone's autobiography is finally being published. Commando: The Autobiography of Johnny Ramone is set for release April 2 by Abrams Image. In an interview Tuesday, his widow, Linda, described the book as "kind of his last word that he knew would be out. " "It is a really powerful book because his whole life has gone before him and he knows it's going to come to an end, and he really needs to tell everybody what he's feeling inside, so that's what makes it so amazing," she added later.

Prosecutors have rested their case against a man charged in a love-triangle slaying that left two people dead. Barry Soldridge Jr., 39, is on trial in Northampton County in the September 2010 killings of Candice Shuey and Derek Henry. A first-degree murder conviction could carry the death penalty. Soldridge's mother testified Tuesday that her son burst into the home in a fury and said, "I want my gun. " When he returned, Donna Soldridge said, he was crying and walking in circles, saying over and over, "Mom, I'm sorry.

By Jeffrey Eugenides Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 416 pp. $28 Reviewed by Glenn C. Altschuler On a warm spring day at Brown University in the early 1980s, after Leonard Bankhead and Madeleine Hanna had "picnicked on each other," Maddy whispers "I love you," in a voice edged with "a sense of peril. " Leonard reaches for his copy of A Lover's Discourse , by Roland Barthes, finds the page with the words "Je t'aime," and hands it to her. Overcome at first with happiness, Madeleine reads on: "Once the first avowal has been made, 'I love you' has no meaning whatever.

Friday-Saturday Love over reason and morality Prisoner Jacob falls in love with the most unconventional and unattainable woman possible: Rachel, a blow-up doll. But Jacob's envious cellmate attempts to break up their newfound happiness. The result is an original thriller/comedy theater piece that breathes new life into the old and overdone love triangle. For mature audiences only. An entry to the 2011 Philly Urban Theatre Festival, Rachel will premiere at the Adrienne Theater at 2030 Sansom St. Information: 302-793-9499, www.putf.org . Sunday Chilling with chili Irresistible smells of chili and chowder simmering on the stove will usher in fall on the Wildwoods Boardwalk, at Mariner's Landing at Morey's Piers, at 11 a.m. Sunday.