Sunday, April 30, 2017
There are mysteries of belief and faith beneath this fascinating parable of a play, roiling like the seawater that churns below the wooden house where its action takes place. This house is b…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:50PMSunday, April 23, 2017
“I do believe you darkies are trying to kill me,” says Martha Washington to her house slaves in this fantastical-historical play, just opened in a sensationally cheeky production…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:42PMSaturday, April 22, 2017
Racism, presumed in polite circles to be no laughing matter, gets a hilariously smart deconstruction in Lydia R. Diamond’s Smart People. Arena Stage has given this 2016 play its DC p…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:47PMThursday, April 20, 2017
As play titles go, Or, is one of the most ungoogleable. It is a search engine dead end. And as an original mashup of past and present, prose and poetry, and performative purposes, Liz Duffy …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:24PMFriday, April 14, 2017
After I watched eleven B.F.A. candidates in Howard University’s Class of 2017 perform a program of self-scripted audition pieces—character-rich monodramas, actually—I had one overw…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:48PMThursday, April 13, 2017
Until I saw Blood Knot at Mosaic Theater Company, I knew the work of Director Joy Zinoman only by reputation. I had come to her legend late. And the production blew me away. Set in apartheid…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:22PMTuesday, April 11, 2017
DC Metro Theater Arts “More Local Performing Arts Coverage Than You’ll Find Anywhere Else” Bruce Markowitz, Founder Joel Markowitz, Publisher and Editor Nicole Hertvik, Assistant Ed…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:45PMMonday, April 10, 2017
There are moments in this gripping, challenging, and deeply thought-provoking drama when the smallest of gestures by the two actors say what the play is about more than words can. A Human Be…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 06:24PMFriday, April 7, 2017
I lost count of how many orgasms are in this show. They keep, um, coming and coming. And each one is performed stunningly by a student actor with such precisely differentiated paroxysms and …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:12PMTuesday, April 4, 2017
As the PETA-hounded circus left town on its farewell tour, I headed to the Atlas Performing Center to see Lucy, an UrbanArias opera about an actual chimp. I was reassured to learn that no an…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:39AMSaturday, April 1, 2017
Even as fear and animus split the human race asunder, great authors have reminded us for millennia that we really are all one. From the ancient Roman playwright Terrence (“I am human, and …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:06PMFriday, March 31, 2017
Director Leslie Jacobson has book-ended Shakespeare’s dark tragedy King Lear with lyrical and lovingly-lit tableaux of the mad king’s court as if in a fairy-tale photo op—Lear regal on…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:25PMTuesday, March 28, 2017
I’ve seen some harrowing-to-watch theater in my time, but I recall nothing as excruciating as a particular scene in Dry Land, now running at Forum Theatre. The play by Ruby Rae Spiegel is …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:01AMPost-Play Palaver is an occasional series of conversations between DCMetroTheaterArts writers who saw the same production—in this case the same two productions, Chekhov’s Three Sisters a…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:50AMSunday, March 26, 2017
“Social ills” is a term often used to name a problem without caring about the people affected by it—as in the phrase “racism and other social ills.” It’s a way of keeping one�…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:53PMTuesday, March 21, 2017
Just now when the world is wracked with wave upon wave of ethnic animus—just now when our country has succumbed to xenophobia not seen on these shores for decades—there comes a work of…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:21AMMonday, March 20, 2017
A shout-out to Studio Theatre co-founder Russell Metheny, who designed the complex on 14th Street, for installing a backstage stairway connecting the dressing rooms of the second-floor Milto…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 06:40PMFriday, March 17, 2017
When I left the Eisenhower Theater last night after witnessing this mesmerizing multimedia marvel, I had a quibble. I had just one, but it could be the most peculiar cavil I’ve ever had ab…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:04PMFriday, March 10, 2017
Lately I’ve been thinking that there are two key questions that must be asked of every season-programming choice by every theater’s artistic director: 1) Why now? 2) So what? There is no…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:18PMThursday, March 2, 2017
F. Scott Fitzgerald was among the first to take an editorial whack at Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises (then called Fiesta). Among other things cut out by Fitzgerald was …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:24PMFriday, February 24, 2017
I greatly admired both the writing and the acting in Shakespeare Theatre Company production of Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III, but to be honest it was the character of Jessica and Michel…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:41AMWednesday, February 22, 2017
The very title poses a puzzle. How what? Why what? Yet the definite articles assert certitude. The what. The how. Turns out in this brainy play about two smart women, perplexity and uncertai…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:33PMSaturday, February 18, 2017
A long-ago love story inspired this richly textured play with 1920s music. When Playwright Stephen A. Butler Jr. was growing up, he heard family stories about how his great-great grandparent…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:38PMSunday, February 12, 2017
Far off the radar of most grownup theatergoers, the writer/director Psalmayene 24 has been creating an extraordinary body of work for children. I’ve been an admirer of the trenchant work h…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:01PMFriday, February 10, 2017
Whatever this play meant to Broadway audiences when it debuted in 1941, just prior to America’s entry into a war of resistance to fascism abroad, what matters now is what it means to audie…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:50PMSunday, February 5, 2017
A man has a remote rustic fishing cabin. There are lot of fish in the water nearby. He’s a rugged, outdoorsy guy and he loves to fish. In a Hemingway novel he would not be a fish out of wa…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:41PMTuesday, January 31, 2017
There is a laugh track with this show. As in a prerecorded TV sitcom where the studio audience was cued to be amused, there’s an overhead LAUGH sign that flashes intermittently accompanied…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:52PMSunday, January 29, 2017
Don’t groan but this is a bloody good show. It rocks, it roils, it’s saucy and sassy, it’s effin in-your-face. The story is gory as you might expect. It’s about the legendary 1892 ax…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:27AMSaturday, January 28, 2017
Lately the news has been resignifying theater more than usual. To resignify is not a commonly used verb but it’s a commonly understood thing. It means “to give new signification to,” t…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:46AMFriday, January 20, 2017
The title of Lisa Loomer’s riveting play Roe refers to both the pivotal Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade and the person known as Jane Roe who was the plaintiff in it. Loomer dramatizes both …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:25AMWednesday, January 18, 2017
I love when a play starts out as a fascinating head trip—a smart, high-concept exhilaration of ideas—then propels me headlong into an overwhelming flood of emotion. It’s like being tra…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:00PM 
