Monday, August 12, 2019
The animus being whipped up against “invaders” at our southern border lends Naomi Wallace’s 1993 The War Boys an unsettling resonance. Written when she was but 26, the play is about th…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:23AMFriday, August 9, 2019
“There are holes in the script!” would be the deathblow for any more conventional work of theater, but in Nassim Solimanpour’s Blank, the gaps are where the action’s at. As with Soli…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:44AMSunday, August 4, 2019
Liz Duffy Adams’s play Or,—which premiered in 2009 at the Women’s Project in New York—is a deliciously literate feminist farce. A radical mashup of dichotomies (among them straight a…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:09PMFriday, August 2, 2019
When Dear Evan Hansen debuted at Arena Stage four years ago, I was so moved by the show I wrote it a love letter, republished below. Now a Broadway hit, it returns to DC for a run at Kennedy…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:36PMSaturday, July 27, 2019
It always sparks joy when Cirque du Soleil comes to town, and its latest Big Top production, Volta, is a crazy-wondrous delight. The show is inspired by amateur street sports, and its theme …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:36PMTuesday, July 23, 2019
Over a period of 16 days in Washington, DC, in July 2019, Mike Daisey gave 18 different performances, each about an hour and 45 minutes long, of his epic look at America’s past, present, a…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:16PMTuesday, July 9, 2019
John: Before you brought A People’s History to DC, you performed all 18 parts three times—once through in Minneapolis and twice through in Seattle. I can imagine people could be picking …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:54PMSaturday, July 6, 2019
Chapter 1: The Gold Earring, July 5 8pm Mike Daisey’s marathon retort to Trump’s Fourth of July “Salute to America” kicked off in the Kogod Chapel last night before a sold-out crowd.…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:31AMThursday, July 4, 2019
Midway through this fast, furious, in-your-face poetic explosive about anti-black racism, one of the three cast members stops the action and says: “I’m sorry, I’m trying to keep up the…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:38AMTuesday, July 2, 2019
Flashing a wide smile and a V sign, outfitted in power suit, sensible pumps, and her trademark glasses and bouffant, Shirley Chisholm enters the Anacostia Playhouse blackbox waving to the ap…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:04PMSunday, June 30, 2019
This power plant of a play knocked me out two years ago during the Capital Fringe Festival and knocked me out all over again in the DC Black Theatre & Arts Festival. The Heroes’ Tale d…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:21PMSaturday, June 29, 2019
One looks for hope where one can find it. And sometimes hope pops up on its own, unexpected. That kind of hope, not sought out, can catch in one’s throat, can even move one to tears. Such …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:02AMWednesday, June 26, 2019
Twisted Melodies is a spectacular finish to Mosaic’s fourth season. Written by and starring Kelvin Roston, Jr., the show sweeps us into Donny Hathaway’s world of magnificent music-making…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:26PMTuesday, June 25, 2019
With the recent release of I Am Not Your Negro and If Beale Street Could Talk, the eminent writer James Baldwin received significant cinematic attention. This has been followed in DC by t…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:45AMSunday, June 23, 2019
I remember being so bored by my high school American history class that I got a D in it. This was not normal. My report cards always had A’s and B’s. So the kindly elderly woman who taug…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:56PMTuesday, June 18, 2019
I have to marvel at all the ways the national culture temple named for our 35th president reaches out to an audience that looks like America. There’s no such uniform audience, of course—…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:18PMFriday, June 14, 2019
How do I love this play? Let me count the ways. My colleague David Siegel’s review heaps accolades on the Round House Theatre production of Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2, now pl…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:44PMThursday, June 13, 2019
The pivotal character in this profoundly moving comedy is Laurel, a young woman who has relocated from Jackson to Byhalia, Mississippi, to make a life with the young man she plans to love fo…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:25PMTuesday, June 11, 2019
Sara Ruhl’s The Oldest Boy tells a gut-wrenching story serenely, almost gently. At the heart of it is the bond between mother and child, a tie that Ruhl knew intimately when she wrote the…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:51AMMonday, June 3, 2019
Post-Play Palaver is an occasional series of conversations between DC Metro Theater Arts writers who saw the same performance, got really into talking about it, and decided to continue their…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:51AMMonday, May 27, 2019
Antiquity is in the house and what’s old is new again. Taffety Punk is presenting two short theater pieces featuring its signature integration of dance, drama, and music based on voices fr…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:21PMSaturday, May 25, 2019
Dane Figueroa Edidi is one of DC’s most original and multitalented theater artists. A dancer, actor, poet, playwright, and choreographer, she is also a teacher, novelist, political comment…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:05PMWednesday, May 22, 2019
A rom-com about manhunting…at Mosaic? That’s probably not the sort of fare you’d expect from DC’s preeminent theatrical platform for social-justice programming. But who is to say tha…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 06:37AMTuesday, May 14, 2019
It was nearly 70 years ago that Carson McCullers adapted her beloved 1946 novel The Member of the Wedding into a prizewinning Broadway play. Set in a small Southern town, the story centers o…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:47AMSunday, May 12, 2019
The circusy-party vibe begins before showtime. The place is festooned with streamers, furnished with comfy sofas, bedecked in colored light, and stocked with bags of popcorn to share. A fr…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:07AMFriday, May 10, 2019
One night five years ago, a horror happened in Chibok, North Eastern Nigeria. The Boko Haram—Islamicist terrorists who believe that Western education is evil—abducted 276 girls from the …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:59PMWednesday, May 8, 2019
The set foreshadows the coming fracas. There’s a fault line down the middle where this living room seems sliced in two. And something’s out of whack. The halves do not align. Like two …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:04PMMonday, May 6, 2019
Three retired nuclear physicists meet in a quaint cottage not far from the nuclear power plant where they once worked and where a catastrophe has occurred. Earthquake, tsunami, tidal wave, r…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:15PMThursday, May 2, 2019
It is rare that theater seriously asks us to believe something far beyond itself. Typically we are asked to suspend disbelief about let’s-pretend that happens on stage. The gripping and in…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:06PMSunday, April 28, 2019
Even in this theater town abounding in innovation, The Tarot Reading stands out as an original. I can’t think of anything it’s quite like. After I saw an iteration last year (The Tarot R…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:17AMFriday, April 26, 2019
Fifty years ago Rolling Stone reported completion of a new album by Pete Townshend and called it “probably the most important milestone in pop since Beatlemania. For the first time, a rock…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:13PM 
