I lost count of how many orgasms are in this show. They keep, um, coming and coming. And each one is performed stunningly by a student actor with such precisely differentiated paroxysms and …
As the PETA-hounded circus left town on its farewell tour, I headed to the Atlas Performing Center to see Lucy, an UrbanArias opera about an actual chimp. I was reassured to learn that no an…
Even as fear and animus split the human race asunder, great authors have reminded us for millennia that we really are all one. From the ancient Roman playwright Terrence ("I am human, and no…
Director Leslie Jacobson has book-ended Shakespeare's dark tragedy King Lear with lyrical and lovingly-lit tableaux of the mad king's court as if in a fairy-tale photo op"Lear regal on his t…
I've seen some harrowing-to-watch theater in my time, but I recall nothing as excruciating as a particular scene in Dry Land, now running at Forum Theatre. The play by Ruby Rae Spiegel is se…
Post-Play Palaver is an occasional series of conversations between DCMetroTheaterArts writers who saw the same production"in this case the same two productions, Chekhov's Three Sisters and A…
"Social ills" is a term often used to name a problem without caring about the people affected by it"as in the phrase "racism and other social ills."Â It's a way of keeping one's distance …
Just now when the world is wracked with wave upon wave of ethnic animus"just now when our country has succumbed to xenophobia not seen on these shores for decades"there comes a work of t…
A shout-out to Studio Theatre co-founder Russell Metheny, who designed the complex on 14th Street, for installing a backstage stairway connecting the dressing rooms of the second-floor Milto…
When I left the Eisenhower Theater last night after witnessing this mesmerizing multimedia marvel, I had a quibble. I had just one, but it could be the most peculiar cavil I've ever had abou…
Lately I've been thinking that there are two key questions that must be asked of every season-programming choice by every theater's artistic director: 1) Why now? 2) So what? There is no sin…
F. Scott Fitzgerald was among the first to take an editorial whack at Ernest Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises (then called Fiesta). Among other things cut out by Fitzgerald was th…
I greatly admired both the writing and the acting in Shakespeare Theatre Company production of Mike Bartlett's King Charles III, but to be honest it was the character of Jessica and Michelle…
The very title poses a puzzle. How what? Why what? Yet the definite articles assert certitude. The what. The how. Turns out in this brainy play about two smart women, perplexity and uncertai…
A long-ago love story inspired this richly textured play with 1920s music. When Playwright Stephen A. Butler Jr. was growing up, he heard family stories about how his great-great grandparent…
Far off the radar of most grownup theatergoers, the writer/director Psalmayene 24 has been creating an extraordinary body of work for children. I've been an admirer of the trenchant work he …
Whatever this play meant to Broadway audiences when it debuted in 1941, just prior to America's entry into a war of resistance to fascism abroad, what matters now is what it means to audienc…
A man has a remote rustic fishing cabin. There are lot of fish in the water nearby. He's a rugged, outdoorsy guy and he loves to fish. In a Hemingway novel he would not be a fish out of wate…
There is a laugh track with this show. As in a prerecorded TV sitcom where the studio audience was cued to be amused, there's an overhead LAUGH sign that flashes intermittently accompanied b…
Don't groan but this is a bloody good show. It rocks, it roils, it's saucy and sassy, it's effin in-your-face. The story is gory as you might expect. It's about the legendary 1892 axe murder…
Lately the news has been resignifying theater more than usual. To resignify is not a commonly used verb but it's a commonly understood thing. It means "to give new signification to," to alte…
The title of Lisa Loomer's riveting play Roe refers to both the pivotal Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade and the person known as Jane Roe who was the plaintiff in it. Loomer dramatizes both st…
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 transport…
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 too …
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…