Theater

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century -- This fitfully transcendent production captures the splintered insights and cut-and-paste aesthetic of Greil Marcus’ cult-classic book about the rise of Britain’s Sex Pistols. The adaptation by the Rude Mechanicals of Austin, Texas, stays aloft through its raw, unnerving energy, restless idea-shuffling and brutally wistful poetry. The Sex Pistols showed youth how to party on truth’s wreckage. No matter if we were really only dancing on culture’s exquisite corpse.

Ends Sunday at Macgowan Hall, UCLA, Wyton Drive and Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, (310) 825-2101.