Wednesday, May 4, 2016
A true story that begins with the desecration of a dead body becomes, before our eyes and hearts, a living and breathing buddy story. Dan O’Brien’s The Body of an American is an intimat…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:48PMMonday, May 2, 2016
You know you’re having an unorthodox experience in theater when there’s a near absence of dramatic action in front of you but an epic interplay of ideas happening in your brain. So it go…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:02PMSaturday, April 30, 2016
When Randy Baker told me he had directed a production of Lord of the Flies with a cast of mostly teenage girls, I knew I had to see it. William Golding’s classic about British schoolboys w…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:51AMTuesday, April 26, 2016
At the center of this beautifully ambiguous and hauntingly honest play is a sick infant. The baby is peculiar, perhaps mythically so, in that it glows like the moon. As we enter the theater,…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:52AMSaturday, April 23, 2016
Believe it or not, this is one terrific piece of theater. It’s a one-man play about an influential, world-class thinker that’s every bit as smart, fascinating, and satisfying as the best…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:21PMTuesday, April 19, 2016
There was a buzz of high energy as we walked into Ari Roth’s office at the Atlas Performing Arts Center to meet with the Founding Artistic Director of the Mosaic Theater Company of DC. We …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:19AMSaturday, April 16, 2016
Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, which premiered in London in 1979, is rightly considered a landmark play. It’s pivotal for me personally as well, ever since I saw the legendary Tommy Tune …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:40PMWednesday, April 13, 2016
Inside the beltway bubble of local theater making, it’s easy to forget how many U.S. citizens are indifferent, if not antipathetic, to live theater. Mainly they express this by voting with…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:25PMSaturday, April 9, 2016
Playwright Jennifer Haley has seen the future and it’s The Nether, her cerebrally chilling thriller about future tech and future sex. Just opened at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in a fan…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:05PMTuesday, March 29, 2016
A prophet is not without honor except in his own country, among his own relatives, and in his own house,” said a certain prophet of Nazareth long ago. Subtract the word “prophet,” swap…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:41PMMonday, March 28, 2016
Martin McDonagh is one my favorite living English-language playwrights and I’m not really sure why. His plays are hilarious and horrific at the same time. And I experienced that counterint…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:22AMTuesday, March 22, 2016
There is so much sorrow in this show Nine fine actors playing nine parents All mourning dead children Searching to see them again Seeking to be with them one more time Speaking words of unsp…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:59AMMonday, March 21, 2016
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” as Leo Tolstoy famously said. Had Tolstoy seen Studio Theatre’s penetrating production of Deirdre Kinahan…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:20PMSaturday, March 19, 2016
Shakespeare Theatre Company has missed no opportunity to issue advisories to audiences about to attend the spectacularly intense Headlong production of George Orwell’s 1984, now on stage a…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:44PMFriday, March 11, 2016
The theater term “packed house” took on all new meaning for me the night I caught this month’s OpenStage New Works Showcase. Not only was there no empty folding chair; the show went on…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:44PMMonday, March 7, 2016
In politics, the expression “Marxist farce” could well be a slur hurled by some puerile and petulant presidential hopeful (you never know these days). In theater, however, the term “Ma…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:19AMThursday, March 3, 2016
Even if you already know how inspiring and moving this show is, from seeing the film or the musical on stage, you are in for a spirit-lifting, heart-leaping, foot-stomping thrill when you ex…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:11PMMonday, February 29, 2016
There is a critical conversation going on in Anacostia right now that may be one of the most urgent and honest exchanges between black women and black men the American theater has ever kno…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:14PMSaturday, February 20, 2016
Last night in a small, tucked-away space in Silver Spring, I watched a “real time” drama so exciting and original, so drop-dead funny and knock-out suspenseful, that I left the theater d…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:40AMFriday, February 19, 2016
At a point in Mosaic Theater’s Promised Land—a powerhouse of a play performed inside an intimate space that’s more like a concrete bunker than a black box—we see the searing image of…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:43PMMonday, February 15, 2016
“The situation in 1940s apartheid South Africa is very similar to what was seen in 1940’s America, 1960’s America, 1980’s America, and even what we see in the present day.” I was t…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:42PMWe enter a mini coliseum and take our seats on cushions of many colors on one of several rows of blue benches encircling the blank stage. The dim lighting feels hallowed; the music, reverent…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:47PMThursday, February 11, 2016
Last night I had the great satisfaction of watching Howard University students take on the challenge of a certifiably risk-taking play—Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Marcus; Or the Secret of Sw…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:43PMTuesday, February 9, 2016
When I recently read Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig, which opened in 1992, I sensed it was written in response to the women’s movement at the time. Wasserstein’s 1988 The H…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:34PMSunday, February 7, 2016
This play by Andrew Bovell in this 1st Stage production burned so many astounding images onto my brain—and sent into my ears so many searing exchanges—that my head is still spinning. For…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:08PMThursday, February 4, 2016
The production of Suzan-Lori Parks’ acclaimed three-part saga now having its regional premiere at Round House Theatre is some of the most amazing storytelling I’ve seen on stage. Amazing…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 06:57AMSunday, January 31, 2016
What’s the best way to stage a modern classic that is both reverential and revelatory? How does one mount a production that is respectful of the author’s intent yet freshly insightful. H…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:17AMThursday, January 28, 2016
It was a record-setting blizzard, not prescient season planning, that resulted in Mosaic Theater Company’s rescheduling the opening of I Shall Not Hate to last night, International Holoca…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:23PMTuesday, January 26, 2016
When I first saw Love in Time of HIV in May 2012, I was deeply impressed. Giving voice to a young generation’s encounter with the health crisis left them by their elders, the play by Kieyo…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:00AMWednesday, January 13, 2016
I just love it when theater laughs at itself. Who can forget the clockwork guffaws of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, or Shakespeare’s enchanting send-up of theatrical conceits in the “Pyr…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:04PMFriday, January 8, 2016
“It’s complicated.” So begins—on a note of supreme understatement—Writer/Performer Aaron Davidman’s captivating and insight-rich solo show, Wrestling Jerusalem, the third provoca…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 06:42PM 
