Friday, October 9, 2015
If you were looking for a local troupe to put Alice’s fabled Wonderland on stage, your top choice would have to be Synetic Theater. And no wonder. Synetic’s trademark physical theater en…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:17PMThursday, October 8, 2015
As you take your seat at Scena Theatre’s production of Lady Lay, don’t be surprised to see the spitting image of Bob Dylan in the house. It’s the actor Ron Litman, who will pop into th…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:35AMTuesday, October 6, 2015
I’ve made a point to see as many productions in the Women’s Voices Theater Festival as I can. Some have thrilled me; some have not. For me theatergoing is like a gambling addiction. I al…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:26PMAfter I saw an early Women’s Voices Theater Festival production (I’ve been to 16 and counting), a question lingered in my mind: Exactly what distinguishes a play as being in a woman’s …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:48PMSunday, October 4, 2015
To all appearances, As One is a chamber opera about someone who transitions from the gender category he was assigned at birth into the gender category she believes she belongs in. As One pre…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:13AMTuesday, September 29, 2015
The Kennedy Center’s entry in the Women’s Voices Theater Festival was a one-night-only reading of Roe, a new two-act play by Lisa Loomer that dramatically personalizes pivotal chapters i…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:51PMMonday, September 28, 2015
Back in summer of 2014, I discovered an extraordinary play, playwright, and performer—7 Layers Captive, written and performed by Stacy Jewell Lewis based on her own true story of being abd…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:19AMSunday, September 27, 2015
Marquis D. Gibson does something in his magnetic performance as the title character in Bhavi the Avenger that I don’t recall ever seeing in theater before: he pretty much singlehandedly m…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:07AMFriday, September 25, 2015
Four-year-old Arcturus Theater Company—a group of DC theater enthusiasts committed to presenting plays that will “prompt discussion on topics that do not come up naturally in everyday co…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:26AMMonday, September 14, 2015
Lucy Kirkwood did not think up the word Chimerica—it was coined by a historian and an economist to name the combustably combined economies of China and the U.S. But wowza did she think up …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:11AMTuesday, September 8, 2015
I just discovered a phenomenal performing arts group that rocked and moved me as much as any experience in theater I can recall. The name of the group is Step Afrika!, an organization renown…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:47PMSunday, September 6, 2015
Kathleen Akerley’s Night Falls on the Blue Planet is a rapturously funny and brainy comedy about a woman named Renee who is losing her mind and finding her body. (Or something like that. I…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:59AMWednesday, September 2, 2015
Who gets to say what in the theater has become an increasingly pressing question. Of course the question has been pressing for a long time; it’s just now getting paid significant attention…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:46AMThursday, August 27, 2015
Last season The Keegan Theatre mounted a Vietnam War–era musical called Hair. In a column I described that production as “radiant and thrilling,” “an exuberant love fest as timeless…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:28PMMonday, August 24, 2015
Twice a week in this land of the free, a white police officer kills a black person—this according to under-reported stats from the FBI. From the official law-enforcement point of view, the…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:35PMSunday, August 23, 2015
Scena Theatre has brought back its hit 2011 production of The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde’s classic comedy of errors, and DC’s summer just got wittier and sweeter. In Scena…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:07PMSunday, August 16, 2015
The eagerly anticipated Women’s Voices Theatre Festival kicked off with the opening of Longacre Lea’s production of two world-premiere one-acts, which the company collectively dubs #Deat…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:49AMSunday, August 9, 2015
The authenticity and specificity of Katie Sullivan’s scenic and properties design for One in the Chamber could qualify it as a character in this engrossing new play by Marja-Lewis Ryan…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:55PMMonday, August 3, 2015
Dear Dear Evan Hansen, I know it might sound odd, but this is a love letter to a musical. I saw you for the first time in my life last night, and I knew right away I had to write you to tell…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:28PMSunday, August 2, 2015
Stephen Sondheim would do well to watch his back. Pallas Theatre Collective has just mounted a new musical, code name: Cynthia, that is just as smart and pointed in its book and lyrics and j…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 06:37PMWednesday, July 29, 2015
When I, a longtime theater buff, moved to DC nearly a dozen years ago, I discovered something weird: The Metro DC theater scene is utterly confusing to anyone who doesn’t already know thei…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:46PMSunday, July 12, 2015
Playwright Isa Seyran has told forthrightly the origin story of Brothel: Reading about the extreme gender imbalance of men to women in North Dakota resulting from an oil boom thanks to frack…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:23AMSaturday, July 11, 2015
As a medium for understanding what has been going on in the Israel-occupied territories, the art of theater can do something that other media cannot. Theater can narrate events and tell st…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:36PMFriday, July 10, 2015
There are many delightful and poignant moments in mostly the VOICE: a black lesbian journey. This engaging autobiographical amalgam of poetry, original music, and storytelling—written and …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:54AMTuesday, June 30, 2015
A outstanding assembly of DC’s African American LGBTQ artists converged to create Plot Twists…, a late addition to the DC Black Theatre Festival lineup. Conceived and produced by Mon…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:29PMSunday, June 28, 2015
A theater troupe from Toronto brought this play to town for three performances only for the DC Black Theater Festival. Secrets of a Black Boy speaks with great honesty and artistry. It achie…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:56AMMonday, June 22, 2015
Madness has been dramatized in theater at least since the ancient Greeks. The mind come loose from its moorings, the persona altered, a terror deep in the self—whether in life or on stage,…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:14AMSunday, June 21, 2015
“It’s really important that we are able to hear our stories on the stage,” said Marie Byrd Sproul as we talked about the show she directed—Out of Silence: Abortion Stories from the 1…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 06:19PMFriday, June 19, 2015
Two years ago I saw the touring production of The Book of Mormon at The Kennedy Center and was utterly blown away. I wrote a column at the time about the profound content of The Book of Morm…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:11PMSunday, June 14, 2015
The theater is no a stranger to the wounds of war. Countless plays and performance pieces have opened our hearts and minds to that which is unhealed and raw, to that which persists as pain a…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:53PMTuesday, June 9, 2015
A hit Broadway comedy, The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, rounds out Theater J’s 2014–2015 season in a production smartly directed by Eleanor Holdridge. Written in a mainstream mode by…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:46PM 
