Tuesday, December 15, 2020
“During peacetime, when we need metaphors, we raid the language of war. But the idiom of wartime is food: cannon fodder, carnage, slaughterhouse. Buildings and people are pancaked, sandwic…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:18AMMonday, February 24, 2020
It’s an image as ancient and archetypal as Medea and La Llorona, and as modern as Andrea Yates—a woman, a mother, standing over the bodies of her drowned children. From this shocking vis…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:24AMSaturday, February 15, 2020
As I was watching the DC premiere of Anna Ziegler’s inspired-by-a-true-story play, Boy, now playing at Keegan Theatre, there was an Oscar Wilde quote rattling around in the back of my brai…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:06PMMonday, January 27, 2020
Am I wearing the right shirt? Is the bottle of wine I brought too cheap? Should I go in for the kiss at the end of the night? These are common questions running through the mind of your aver…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:03AMSaturday, December 14, 2019
Like it or not, the New Year is rapidly approaching, which means our minds will shortly be turning toward making resolutions and setting intentions for the decade to come. After seeing Taylo…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 04:33PMTuesday, November 19, 2019
“The whole impetus of air guitar is world peace,” earnestly intones a grown man who goes by the name Golden Thunder right before he goes out on stage in a dingy bar to play a pretend ins…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:24PMTuesday, November 5, 2019
“History does not always repeat itself,” wrote science fiction writer and editor of Astounding Science Fiction, John W. Campbell Jr. “Sometimes it just yells, ‘Can’t you remember a…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:36AMFriday, October 25, 2019
When you leave this world, what are you going to leave behind for your loved ones? Memories? An inheritance? How about an entire fantasy world in which a version of you lives on and offers i…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:24PMMonday, October 14, 2019
Hotels rooms are one of those things we largely take for granted but are rich fodder for those of us with overactive imaginations who consistently wonder about the other people who have prev…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:18AMMonday, September 16, 2019
Washington, DC, is one of the few cities in the country where it’s not uncommon for large groups of people to come together to spend two hours deep in conversation about the constitution a…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:54PMTuesday, August 27, 2019
It has become a trope of a certain type of made-for-TV movie for the successful, career-driven woman in the Big City to have to return home to her humble beginnings and learn the true meanin…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 05:12PMMonday, July 22, 2019
“The best thing about majoring in Invisibility Studies,” jokes Emil Guillermo early on in his one-person show, Emil Amok! All Pucked Up: Harvard, NPR and more, making its DC premiere rig…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:12AMFriday, July 19, 2019
DC is (in)famous for being a “transitional” city—people move here, stay for a few years, and then leave. But what happens when you discover your love of playwriting here and then move …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:03PMThursday, July 18, 2019
Darkness. Silence. The flapping of wings. A gunshot. A single dead dove hovering above the stage. These are the opening moments of Douglas Robinson’s surreal look at the senselessness and …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 05:36PMTuesday, July 16, 2019
Well, it’s mid-July, so we’re deep in the thick of it and there’s no turning back now… it’s officially wedding season. It was fitting, then, that I was returning to DC from a lovel…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:36AMMonday, June 24, 2019
“Give me one reason to stay here,” crooned Tracy Chapman in 1995, “and I’ll turn right back around.” A few years earlier, a 7-year-old named Duncan MacMillan embraced the spirit of…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:12PMMonday, June 10, 2019
Plenty of pop culture real estate—from The Omen to We Need to Talk About Kevin, to name a few—has been devoted to parents coming to terms with the possibility that their child may be pur…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 04:18PMMonday, June 3, 2019
“Fiction carries a greater amount of truth in solution than the volume which purports to be all true,” wrote British novelist William Makepeace Thackery, author of Vanity Fair. This simp…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:12PMTuesday, May 28, 2019
When asked about how she comes up with ideas for her plays (which, let me tell you from personal experience, is every writer’s favorite interview question), playwright, director, and filmm…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:36PMThursday, May 9, 2019
“In the end, we’re all just taller children,” croons Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Elizabeth Ziman on her band, Elizabeth & The Catapult’s, aptly title 2009 song, “Taller Ch…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:54PMTuesday, April 23, 2019
There’s a notion these days in theatrical circles that the hallmark of a great play is that it can only be a play; that the story being told wouldn’t work in any other medium. As I was w…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 04:59PMTuesday, April 9, 2019
In his note in the program of Rainbow Theatre Project’s new production of Tennessee Williams’ lesser-known play Clothes for a Summer Hotel—his last to be produced on Broadway in his li…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:16AMMonday, March 25, 2019
“We’re in a strange relationship with our fiction, you see,” Warren Ellis, the English comic-book writer, novelist, and screenwriter, once wrote. “Sometimes we fear it’s taking us …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:28PMMonday, March 18, 2019
Was Anton Chekhov touched with the gift of prophecy when he wrote the first of his four major plays, The Seagull? Or, even rarer, with self-awareness? The piece, which begins with a disastro…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:34AMMonday, February 25, 2019
Morrie Schwartz, the sociology professor and subject of Mitch Albom’s bestselling book, Tuesdays with Morrie, once said, “Death ends a life, not a relationship. All the love you created …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:17AMMonday, February 11, 2019
They say you should never meet your heroes, but what about crowd-surfing them? That was what I was thinking the night of February 8, as I helped keep John Cameron Mitchell aloft as he made h…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:24AMMonday, February 4, 2019
Few words strike fear into the hearts of wide swaths of the theatre-going population than ‘Audience Participation.’ But when said participation involves sipping champagne, swanning aroun…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:48PMMonday, January 21, 2019
A couple of weeks ago, the satire site McSweeney’s published an article entitled, “How Can I Help to Promote Diversity Without Relinquishing Any of My Power?” This title alone could se…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 03:18PMThere’s no such thing as love without risk. Risk of rejection. Risk of your partner finding someone else. But for gay men in the ‘80s and ‘90s, at the height of the AIDS crisis, love a…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:04PMWednesday, December 5, 2018
Several years ago, a good friend of mine married a Swiss citizen. Over many glasses of wine, she detailed to me having to provide emails, OkCupid messages, photos, a dn receipts to prove the…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:06AMTuesday, November 13, 2018
In fraught times, where do you go to find hope? Assuming the answer is not “within yourself,” might I suggest the basement of a church where, seated in a circle with a group of strangers…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:54AM 
