Thursday, August 21, 2014
Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s Shining City raises a question about our demons: do we make them up to punish ourselves, or do they exist outside us in the world? For most of the play, …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:27AMI expected Doug Wright’s play I Am My Own Wife to be a different kind of Anne Frank story, one in which the heroine survives by hiding in plain sight. Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, the play’s…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:36AMTuesday, June 3, 2014
I learned a lot from Jon Spelman’s new monologue The Prostate Dialogues. I learned, for example, that prostate glands produce the inert component of semen, which is why all male mammals ha…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:24AMMonday, June 2, 2014
In most ways, In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play gives us what we came to see, argue as we might that we didn’t come to see that. You didn’t? No! We thought it would be, like, a drama…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:50PMWednesday, May 7, 2014
There was a lot of melding going on at Round House Theatre/Silver Spring last Saturday night — eras, genres, generations, linguistic styles, political paradigms — and some of the combina…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 06:43AMWednesday, April 30, 2014
Brian Friel’s play Faith Healer begins with a fact about reality that’s difficult to process: sometimes the miracle will happen. Then what? “Faith healing is a craft without an apprent…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:25AMFriday, April 18, 2014
One thing I’ve always wondered about Shakespeare’s Henry plays is why do Hal and Falstaff like each other so much? I understand that Falstaff sees a younger version of himself in Hal, wi…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:40AMWednesday, April 16, 2014
Irish theatre and Irish music sometimes make me wonder if the Irish people have taken liberty with the English language in requital of the liberty that the English people took from them. Wha…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:39AMWednesday, March 26, 2014
I’d like to say that Philip Ridley’s new play Tender Napalm tells the story of two lovers trying to help each other recover from a traumatic event, possibly the death of their child, per…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:19AMWednesday, March 19, 2014
Director Gavin Witt’s version of Twelfth Night, now at Center Stage, begins in the lobby, where clips from atmospheric movies like Casablanca, Sullivan’s Travels, and Quai des Brumes pla…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:44AMFriday, March 14, 2014
Last week I came to a conclusion: the best way to increase the entertainment value of a mediocre play, like Timon of Athens, is to give it to a repertory theater company. They’ll mix it in…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:48AMTuesday, March 4, 2014
One day, when Charles Fuller was in high school, he and a friend came across a poem by T.S. Eliot. “And it had this line,” Fuller recalls. “‘Do I dare disturb the Universe?’” He …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:11PMTuesday, February 11, 2014
It seems reasonable to say that Jess Jung’s production of Happy Days, a play of sorts by Samuel Beckett, is theater reduced to its bare essentials, or elevated to its bare essentials, or r…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:09AMTuesday, February 4, 2014
Richard III shouldn’t work very well. It looks like a quest narrative, but nothing of substance stands between the anti-hero and his goal, so it’s more like a project narrative. Not much…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:03AMMonday, January 13, 2014
I have two surprises to report. The first is that I liked Snyetic Theater’s production of Twelfth Night. I didn’t think I would, because it tells the story of Viola and Sebastian with mo…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:21AMTuesday, December 10, 2013
- in which we suggest a holiday trip to American Shakespeare Center in the lovely town of Staunton, VA nestled in the Shenendoah valley - I don’t much see myself in Ebenezer Scrooge. He’…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:01AMWednesday, October 23, 2013
Somehow I missed the beginning of Aaron Posner’s Romeo and Juliet. Not the famous beginning — “Two households, both alike in dignity,” — but the real one, which must have h…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:35AMSaturday, October 19, 2013
Molotov Theatre Group, named for the Soviet Foreign Minister who said his planes were delivering food to Helsinki when they were really dropping cluster bombs, sounds like a place where a pl…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:12AMWednesday, October 2, 2013
To see Lucas Hnath’s new play Red Speedo, you climb stairs from the second-floor gallery at Studio Theater, pass through a door into backspace, climb more stairs, pass through a door into …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:05AMTuesday, September 24, 2013
Story-telling conquers in She Stoops I know what I’m supposed to see in She Stoops to Conquer. The man who wrote the play, Oliver Goldsmith, also wrote an essay arguing that if we couldn�…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:36AMMonday, August 19, 2013
Aaron Sorkin’s play A Few Good Men is a military courtroom drama that invites us to ponder the role of justice in a realm where rank means right. But not seeing much to ponder there, I lef…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:27AMTuesday, August 6, 2013
As a busy man who likes to see a lot of theater, I might ask two questions about the current production of Romeo and Juliet at the American Shakespeare Center: why should I see that play aga…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:43AMSunday, July 21, 2013
Wonders Rattles Skeletons in America’s Closet A Discourse on the Wonders of the Invisible World, the new play by Liz Duffy Adams, gets its water from the well Nathaniel Hawthorne used to g…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:10PMThursday, July 18, 2013
Mark St. Germain’s new play Scott and Hem in the Garden of Allah, which was commissioned by The Contemporary American Theater Festival, is the sort of historical fiction that gets its thru…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:02PMWednesday, July 17, 2013
H2O Brings Big Ideas to Life Good plays put people in circumstances that force them to confront essential questions; great plays move people past essential questions to a place where there�…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:52PMMonday, July 15, 2013
If I had left Thursday night’s performance of Modern Terrorism just thirty seconds earlier, it would be easy to write about, because the play itself is really good and the current producti…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:07PMTuesday, July 9, 2013
Shephard’s Heartless Probes an In-between Existence All I remember from my first encounter with Sam Shepard’s plays is that one of the characters in La Turista works and works at making …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:17PMFriday, June 14, 2013
Georgetown Filmmakers Offer a Vision of Freedom The East, a new movie by Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling, addresses some of the broadest, farthest-reaching dilemmas troubling the world today…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:00AMFriday, May 31, 2013
The 39 Steps: a Whirlwind Comes to Purcellville Playwright Patrick Barlow calls The 39 Steps “an adaptation,” and I would assert that every production of it is an adaptation of that adap…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:17AMWednesday, May 8, 2013
Folger’s Twelfth Night is Beautifully Conceived It’s a disk, or a lens, or giant kaleidoscope, thirty feet high and thirty feet wide. Or a big round stained-glass window, maybe, slanted …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:26PMSunday, May 5, 2013
Unhappy Family Fights It Out at Arena Stage Other Desert Cities, the last play in the 2012-2013 season at Arena Stage, takes place on wall-to-wall white carpet in a living room furnished wit…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:51PM 
