In the Devine black box theater at Georgetown University's Davis Performing Arts Center, nine casually dressed undergraduate students, seated in chairs or on the floor take turns telling the…
A klaxon sounds. A video montage of "Betsy" LaQuanda Ross (actor and playwright Liza Jessie Peterson) passing through the visitor entrance at a correctional facility plays in black and white…
Taking their seats in the black box theater, the audience is confronted with three immobile figures cloaked in chiaroscuro, as small, gold-leafed picture frames faintly reflect tiny boxes of…
A young Vladimir Putin (Christopher Geary) steps onto the stage, wearing a 1980s tracksuit, quoting a passage from the Soviet absurdist and surrealist writer Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) "How a…
As Talley’s Folly opens, 40-something-year-old, self-described "hairy Jewish accountant" Matt Friedman (John Taylor Phillips) steps onto the stage and informs the audience that he has …
From the moment the audience enters the large square room that is Spooky Action Theater’s church basement home, Environmental Designer Colin K. Bills has already communicated to the au…
Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s Our Class opens in 1926 in a kindergarten classroom in a small town in northeastern Poland. Whereas in most of Europe’s Jews had experienced a long history…
Nobel laureate Dario Fo’s Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay! (one of several English language renderings of the original title, Non Si Paga! Non Si Paga!) opens as Antonia (Francesca Ma…
King John is so rarely performed (indeed, it’s been a decade since I last saw it staged) that the current Aaron Posner-directed production at the Folger Theatre opens with a primer on …
Entering the black box theater space at the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, it is clear that We Happy Few’s A Midnight Dreary is not a normal theatrical adaptation of classic literature. A…
Seasonally-themed evenings of short plays are a staple for smaller theater companies " and with Halloween just weeks away, The Coil Project offers up a quartet of violent and supernatural on…
The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare’s earliest and most popular works, so there is little point recounting the plot. One must only remember that it is the one with two sets of t…
Storytelling is one of the most ancient of the performing arts, distinct from that of the dramatic actor, and when Mona Golabek makes her entrance, it is not as an actor playing a character …
Director Kip Fagan opens this production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Gloria with a clever conceit: Miles (Justin Weaks), an office intern, is at his desk, as the contrapuntal woodwinds …
The melody may be unfamiliar, but the music that opens The 100th Monkey Theatre Ensemble’s 52:15 is immediately recognizable as a television news show open. A reporter, speaking to the…
An unnamed academic (Cristen Stephansky), in town for a conference, lounges on a sofa taking notes for her presentation. Her host, (Karoline Troger) a similarly unnamed Austrian scholar now …
An ancient professor (Mickey Hays) ambles into the lecture hall, his collapsed posture and bowlegged, turned-out stance recalling Pantalone of the commedia dell’arte (he even wears the…
ORT Productions’ Beauty and the Beat begins with a trio of dancers (Kelly Hogan, Carrie Monger, and Amy Scaringe) entering in formation into the graffitied performance space of the Bli…
As the audience enters to see Roko’s Basilisk produced by Reliant Theatre, they are handed not a playbill, but a flyer, whose relevance is not immediately apparent. Its text simply …
Theatre Du Jour’s The Accidental Pilgrim is an ensemble-devised work, directed by company co-founder B. Stanley. The ensemble’s style is heavily indebted to such twentieth-centur…
New York, 1991: Zalmy (Tyler Herman) and Shmuly (Josh Adams) are two young men, best friends since childhood, excited to get behind the wheel of their newly acquired RV. What makes them diff…
The setting (designed by Daniel Prosky) is not a battlefield in Anatolia in modern day Turkey, but what appears to be the office of an academic " perhaps a classicist. There is no computer o…
Though it has commonly been staged as a tragedy or psychological drama since its Moscow premiere, Anton Chekhov always insisted that The Cherry Orchard was a comedy. A story about an aristoc…
Sherry (Lady Davonne), a WMATA train driver, starts her day at Shady Grove in Derwood, MD. She has a word with the lead car of her train, "Forty-Twenty": a soon to be decommissioned vehicle …
Though he had a wide stylistic range, in America, Federico GarcÃa Lorca’s fame as a playwright is mostly limited to his rural tragedy, Blood Wedding (Bodas de Sangre) which was orig…