A play from the 1980s about revenge for a rape, based on an ancient story from Greek mythology, comes alive in a student production as though it was about now. As though everything in it abo…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:54AMFor anyone who is more than a little unnerved that President Trump might go off half-cocked and trigger a war—which he could do with as little thought as he puts into a tweet—this civic-…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:24AM“Why am I a stranger in my own land?” the preternaturally talented actor-writer Dan Hoyle asks during his solo excursion into the heartland of America. Having set forth several y…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:15PMHe might have had an interesting idea for a solo show. He hadn’t written it yet. but he told Studio Theatre, which had booked him, that its title would be A Short Series of Disagreeme…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:56AM“Even monsters need clothing,” says the bespoke tailor Anselm, an Arab Jew and immigrant, defending why he will sew a vicuña suit for a Republican presidential candidate whom hi…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:48AMThe wonder-filled stories that wend their way through In the Red and Brown Water were located by the playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney in “the distant present” in a fictional town…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:26PMHaving heralded five* Welders productions, I approached Debra Kim Sivigny’s Hello, My Name Is… with both eagerness and wariness. Knowing that Sivigny had chosen as her subject a …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:30PMThe big laughs in Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage come from watching grownups behaving badly, and the big joke is that four parents end up acting more like petulant, belligerent children…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:53AMStrong writing, passionate acting, and a meaningful purpose combined to make Judge Me Not a gem of a show. An assemblage of monologues around a common theme, the show came with a message: D…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 06:24PMAmong the revelatory dimensions of this lyrical play is one that caught my attention by surprise. I knew going in that Sotto Voce, by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Nilo Cruz, would re…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:43AMRarely have I enjoyed such a perfect union of comic writing, acting, and staging with such non-stop hilarity. Just opened in the intimate Ark theater at Signature. An Act of God, had me dou…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:31PMWhen two lovers in life or on stage display an intense interaction of attraction, they are said to have “chemistry.” That elusive feeling may be more than a metaphor, according t…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:31PMThis season for whatever reason—and far be it from me to speculate—three theater companies in the nation’s capital are presenting Stephen Sondheim’s tunefully insolent tribut…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:47PMHard to imagine a dramatic work more perfect for undergraduate actors or more pertinent to the racial tensions of our times than Dominique Morisseau’s trenchant Blood at the Root, now…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:58AMThe great Irish actor Lisa Dwan is in town doing something with the playwright Harold Pinter right now at the Lansburgh Theatre that is utterly amazing. She is both doing Pinter and undoing …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:31AMThis is a most peculiar play, but in a very good way. It’s more about its form than its content. And that’s what makes it one of Forum Theatre’s most fascinating offerings.…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:47PMPost-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 05:44PMIn a recent satire published on Medium, the San Francisco writer/actor/comedian Alison Page listed five dozen “Honest Theatre Awards.” Among them was one that struck me as an apt…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:31PMWinner of five Helen Hayes Awards last season, Theater Alliance’s production of Word Becomes Flesh is now playing at Anacostia Playhouse in an encore presentation that is garnering eve…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 06:36PMI reported on this extraordinary play when it was a staged reading at Theater J last June and said at the end: “Somebody needs to pick this one up and bring it back.” Well, that&…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:38PMThere are times in the theater when the particulars of a play—its people, place, and poetics—pull you in as only an arresting, well-told story can. But then something even more interesti…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:23AMIn what is surely the most badass, take-no-prisoners performance by a musical artist on a DC stage in recent memory, Miche Braden brings her sensational star turn as Bessie Smith to H Street…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:18PMEvery great play by Shakespeare takes on altered shades of meanings depending on a production’s directing, design, and acting. That’s a theater truism. Also well-known to practit…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:43PMThe musical Big Fish is by any measure a feel-good show for the whole family, as evidenced by the buoyant and beautiful production now playing at The Keegan Theatre. But the main narrative a…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:06PMNo sooner did some aerial apparatus drop from the fly space—ropes, straps, silks, hoops, trapezes—but what some artist-athletes would take hold of it and make acts of suspended animation…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:19AMFans of Synetic Theater’s music-and movement-based works derived from classic texts will find a surprise twist in the company’s latest offering. Typically, s Synetic extravaganza…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:49PMThe world of Wig Out! is a glittering fantasia on house ballroom culture. Tarell Alvin McCraney’s ingeniously metatheatrical 2006 script sets this play with music in the urban underg…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:21PMAmong the issues polarizing America (and degrading public discourse) is the hot-button question of what to do about guns. Proponents of positions right and left talk past each other. Both ca…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:18PMToni Rae Salmi is an actor seen frequently on DC stages, most recently “enjoyably grand” in Perfect Arrangement at Source Festival. In Help Me, Wanda!, she belts out a rockin&…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:35PMThe original The Originalist returns to Arena in a much larger house (The Kreeger, not the Kogod Cradle where it debuted in 2015). This is fitting. The play, the performances, and the produc…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:02PMFour black men in their forties sit around a chess game in Dupont Circle park in 1980. They open the show singing barbershop-quartet style, an upbeat song about themselves: They are the 1342…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:13AM
