Actor-playwright James Sherman, a Columbia College Chicago Theatre Department faculty member who teaches playwriting and improvisation, is getting good reviews for his one-man play The Ben Hecht Show, a portrait of legendary Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht. The show runs July 24-August 16 at the Zephyr Theatre, 7456 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles.

This “very interesting entertaining and humorous 80 minute one man show . . . is intriguing and an excellent history lesson well worth seeing,” wrote Harrison Held in Discover Hollywood Magazine.

In the play, set in 1943, Sherman plays onetime Chicago newspaper reporter Ben Hecht, who wrote the hit Broadway comedy The Front Page and then wrote or doctored the screenplays for such classic films as Gone with the Wind, Wuthering Heights, Stagecoach, Scarface, Nothing Sacred, Foreign Correspondent, Spellbound, Kiss of Death, and His Girl Friday (a film version of The Front Page). During World War II, Hecht became a devoted activist against the atrocities in Europe and spent the rest of his life using his voice against the forces of anti-Semitism. Hecht’s story reflects boldly on the questions faced by American Jewry to this day.

Sherman is a former Second City mainstage cast member whose plays are regularly produced by theatres throughout the United States and have also been seen in Canada, Mexico, South America, England, Germany, Austria, Turkey, South Africa, Australia, China, and Korea.

For tickets to The Ben Hecht Show, click here or call 323-960-7861.