Wednesday, 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 03:00PMTuesday, January 17, 2017
Lucy Breedlove makes her professional debut playing the middle of three siblings in Lillian Hellman’s 1941 play Watch on the Rhine. In the childhood they are having, the bogeyman is all to…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:38PMSunday, January 15, 2017
Queering Shakespeare may be gilding the lily. And if so DC these days has seen quite a few such embellished flowers. Like, golden nosegays for days. One of the best and freshest in the bunch…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:23PMSaturday, January 14, 2017
The American theater has generated some great plays prompted by the tragic events of 9/11. I remember vividly Neil LaBute’s powerful 2002 drama The Mercy Seat, in a production LaBute direc…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:31PMFriday, January 13, 2017
Someone Is Going to Come is a comedy of menace with a roiling undercurrent of sexual tension. It evokes ominous noirish goings-on in a scary remote locale told in stark idiosyncratic dialogu…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:12PMTyler Bowman makes his Arena Stage debut playing the youngest of three siblings in Lillian Hellman’s 1941 play Watch on the Rhine. The children have traveled with their mother and father t…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:21PMThursday, January 12, 2017
Just opened at Mosaic Theater Company in a thrilling and vibrant production directed by Natsu Onoda Power is a play that puts on stage some of what National Geographic just called the gender…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:14PMWednesday, January 11, 2017
Ethan Miller makes his Arena Stage debut playing one of the three children in Lillian Hellman’s 1941 drama Watch on the Rhine. It’s is not what you’d call a kid’s show. Set in 1940, …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:54PMTuesday, January 10, 2017
Strange to watch a play unfold and wish that it did not feel so chillingly relevant. Or that the past it depicts never happened. Or that the moral and material uncertainty at its core did …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:30AMTuesday, December 27, 2016
Theater in DC has begun only recently to tell stories that attempt to be faithful to trans experience. Despite progress on local stages toward accurate portrayals of the lives of other popul…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:00PMSaturday, December 17, 2016
With the audience seated in the round on a floor shared by the playing space, you could feel the whole place shaking and quaking. It was no subterranean tremor; it was the ebullient Step Afr…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:32PMWednesday, December 14, 2016
Post-Play Palaver is an occasional series of conversations between DCMetroTheaterArts writers who saw the same performance, got really into talking about it, and decided to continue their ex…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:59PMThe year 2013, when the Supreme Court narrowly struck down the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional, has already faded from America’s short-term memory but not so much as has 1996, …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:32PMMonday, December 12, 2016
The acclaimed Fiasco Theater production of Into the Woods has come to the Eisenhower Theater at Kennedy Center for the holidays—I am tempted to say for a spell, because the show is enchant…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:45AMMonday, December 5, 2016
Watching the Folger Consort’s robust and warmhearted staging of this medieval mystery play, I was struck by how curiously it connects us today to the audiences who first saw it performed. …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:51PMFriday, December 2, 2016
The storytelling in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen—which won the 2000 Tony Award for Best Play—is ingeniously done. The play’s three characters are deceased. They are actual historical f…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:15PMWednesday, November 30, 2016
Always on the lookout for provocative theater in improbable places, I went to the one-night-only DC premiere of a politically edgy and surprisingly funny send-up of Yahweh, the God of the Ol…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:45PMTuesday, November 29, 2016
I saw Black Nativity last year at Anacostia Playhouse and was so thrilled by it (as I wrote in my rave review), I had to go again this year. I went expecting to see a reproduction of a spl…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:54AMTuesday, November 22, 2016
A debate about the existence of hell is combusting in the nation’s preeminent Jewish theater. And that particular drama in that particular venue could not be more anomalous. There is in Ju…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:44PMFriday, November 18, 2016
Playwright Young Jean Lee’s audacious title refers to the particular—the white widowed father (Ed) and his three grown sons (Drew, Jake, and Matt) who are on stage for most of this natur…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:30PMWednesday, November 16, 2016
“We certainly didn’t prepare ourselves for this,” said Forum Theatre Artistic Director Michael Dove Monday night at the Silver Spring Black Box Theatre. He was addressing a packed hous…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:00PMSaturday, November 12, 2016
Having been watching a con man on the national stage for too long now, I found myself last night watching a con man on a local theater stage from an unusually timely point of view. To put it…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:08AMThursday, November 10, 2016
For the second show in his first season as artistic director of Theater J, the nation’s largest and most prominent Jewish theater, Adam Immerwahr picked a play with the counterintuitive …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 06:17PMWednesday, November 9, 2016
This beautiful play about black teenagers with bleak futures left me with such a melancholy sadness that two days later (on what was then Election Day?), it had not gone away. I share that n…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:40PMSunday, November 6, 2016
Among the adages that keep women put down and passive is the one that goes, “Good girls don’t fight.” It’s a specious presumption that infects culture like an immobilizing toxin. It�…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:37PMSaturday, November 5, 2016
Fans of STREB Extreme Action were out in force last night at The Kennedy Center. Enthusiasm in the Eisenhower Theater was at a fervor one might find at a rave or rock gig. The singular chore…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:53PMFriday, November 4, 2016
There’s a delectable new musical in town celebrating a distinctive genre of music called Go-Go, and it’s gotta be one of the most go-to fun times to be had in DC right now. The show is i…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:38PMWednesday, November 2, 2016
This seems to be the season in DC Metro Theater for pugilistic women. Women who box claimed the stage in Jen Silverman’s Collective Rage (just closed at Woolly Mammoth Theater Company). A …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:16AMThursday, October 27, 2016
There comes a scene in Rameau’s Nephew at Spooky Action Theater when Robert Bowen Smith playing He (the titular character) coughs an aria. Literally. Just like an opera singer except witho…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:25AMMonday, October 24, 2016
You might say The Trump Card keeps getting dealt one new hand after another. Since Mike Daisey’s monologue played to acclaim in August at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Donald Trump’s …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:05PMI’d never been to Beertown, though I knew it by reputation as a must-visit burg. Folks had told me of this storied hamlet in the heartland where the local citizenry gather every five years…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:36AM 
