I’ll be frank: for much of 8 Stops, Deb Margolin’s newest solo performance piece, now at Unexpected Stage Company, I was bored. I didn’t necessarily want to commit suicide,…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:15AMChisa Hutchinson’ The Wedding Gift takes its audience into a fascinating world: an exotic “paradise” where matriarchy rules and the white / black power dynamic is turned on…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:30AMRonan Noone’s The Second Girl received its second chance opening at the Contemporary American Theater Festival last weekend and, like its hardscrabble characters, it’s a well-deserved se…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:19AMBags and umbrella in hands, a young woman arrives late for the theater, apologizing profusely and comically all the while. She notices the “live” caged bird on stage while proclaiming wh…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:15AMSusan Miller’s 20th Century Blues, which opened last weekend at Shepherdstown’s Contemporary American Festival, speaks right from the heart of successful, east coast boomer women. Fou…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:53PMThe Contemporary American Theater Festival opened Friday, July 8, 2016, for the 26th time: five new plays with five new stories to tell. In Chistina Anderson’s pen/man/ship at the in-…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:30AMMidway through Glacier: a climate change ballet, a lone dancer, Therese Gahl, glided onto the stage. Costumed in a vibrant blue tutu, her long legs and arms and their deep earth tones, she…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:24AMThe Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, is approaching its second quarter of a century of new American plays. This year’s rot…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:21AMAt the center of Bruce Norris’ tragicomic exploration of American “community” hangs Kenneth (Win Britt), the Korean War Vet who returns home only to commit suicide in his f…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:09PMThere’s no question that Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is a problem play, fraught with old hates that were once considered justified and old beliefs that have long lost their …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:31PMBen Hoover’s Midlife explores that most difficult of theatrical terrains, human subjectivity. Not that subjectivity expressed by human babble, i.e., talking, of which America’s l…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 06:35PMAn Octoroon, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ re-imagining of Dion Boucicault’s pre-Civil War classic The Octoroon, opened last night at Woolly Mammoth. Postmodern, hip, sardonic, farcica…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:59PMFishamble: The New Play Company opened its “Tiny Plays for Ireland and America” last night as part of Ireland 100. Act I consisted of 20 short, Irish plays in 90 minutes, and eac…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:58PMMake no mistake about it. World War I kicked the crap out of patriotic idealism. Just ask Wilfred Owens. His “Dulce et Decorum et” is one of the most powerful denunciations of th…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:10PMHedda Tesman, aka., Hedda Gabler, has it all: beauty, grace, status, ambition, wit, and feminine mystique. And, per usual, it’s the mystique that does her in. Studio Theatre’s He…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:46PMPhaeton, now on stage at Taffety Punk’s Capital Hill Arts Workshop, is a world premiere. Inspired by the Greek myth, the man-god Phaeton is granted one wish by his Helios father: he de…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:25PMIn The Protean Self, Robert Jay Lifton explores the wonders of human resilience in times of profound disturbance and change. In Hkeelee (Talk to Me), a theatrical memoir of sorts, writer…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:29PMMary Zimmerman has mastered the stage adaptation, particularly of the classic tale, freely blending cultural forms and styles with hypnotic brilliance. Her Metamorphoses and Arabian Nights a…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:39PMDo you want to feel good? Do you want to forget for a couple of hours the political hate speech that’s currently filling the airways, or the vast economic inequality and the rise of a …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:00PMIn the middle of Jennifer Haley’s beautifully poetic The Nether, now playing at The Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, the detective quotes Theodore Roethke’s “In a Dark Time:…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:13PMIn the beginning was the Word–In the beginning was Reason–In the beginning was the Spirit. In the beginning was… Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy (he renou…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:03PMWhen you decide to be a dissident artist–think Paul Robeson–you’d better be willing to suffer the consequences. When you challenge a nation’s founding mythology, an e…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:22PMFamily dramas are not rare; in fact, they are abundant; in fact, they dominate the theatrical landscape. Quality family dramas are rare, however: those that resound beyond their domesticity …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:46PMLet me admit this right from the start. I’m 60 years old. I don’t go to concerts much. I had heard of Green Day (I’ve worked with teenagers for decades), but had not listen…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:04PMPrepare to be assaulted! Head-on by Headlong Theatre’s 1984, now on stage at STC’s Lansburgh Theatre. George Orwell’s novel has become the iconic symbol of the totalitarian…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:52PMVân-Ánh Võ’s The Odyssey: from Vietnam to America conjures, to a Western audience, images of Odysseus, returning from victory at Troy, being punished by the gods, losing his army, h…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:48AMCellist Rubin Kodheli joins the legendary performance artist Laurie Anderson on stage at The Terrace Theater for a presentation of her new multimedia work, the memory-haunting Language of th…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:28PMBefore there was Desperate Housewives, before there was Sex in the City, before there was Thelma and Louise, there was the play, Crimes of the Heart. Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize winni…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:37AMOn rare occasions the world of theatre and the world in which we live converge: the subject of the theatre we witness on the stage and the subjects we hear on the streets and on the news har…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:12PMNick Payne’s Constellations embraces String Theory and its multiverses as it takes its intimate, in-the-round, Stage 4 audience on an emotional rollercoaster ride through the courtship…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:40PMLegacy Street, a new play by Lauren Jane Redmond, an MFA Playwriting candidate at The Catholic University of America, premiered last night at the Callan Theatre. A gritty look at violence in…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:38PM
