748 stories by "John Stoltenberg"
Strange to watch a play unfold and wish that it did not feel so chillingly relevant. Or that the past it depicts never happened. Or that the moral and material uncertainty at its core di…
Theater in DC has begun only recently to tell stories that attempt to be faithful to trans experience. Despite progress on local stages toward accurate portrayals of the lives of other popul…
With the audience seated in the round on a floor shared by the playing space, you could feel the whole place shaking and quaking. It was no subterranean tremor; it was the ebullient Step Afr…
The year 2013, when the Supreme Court narrowly struck down the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional, has already faded from America's short-term memory but not so much as has 1996, th…
The acclaimed Fiasco Theater production of Into the Woods has come to the Eisenhower Theater at Kennedy Center for the holidays"I am tempted to say for a spell, because the show is enchantin…
Watching the Folger Consort's robust and warmhearted staging of this medieval mystery play, I was struck by how curiously it connects us today to the audiences who first saw it performed. He…
The storytelling in Michael Frayn's Copenhagen"which won the 2000 Tony Award for Best Play"is ingeniously done. The play's three characters are deceased. They are actual historical figures w…
Always on the lookout for provocative theater in improbable places, I went to the one-night-only DC premiere of a politically edgy and surprisingly funny send-up of Yahweh, the God of the Ol…
I saw Black Nativity last year at Anacostia Playhouse and was so thrilled by it (as I wrote in my rave review), I had to go again this year. I went expecting to see a reproduction of a s…
A debate about the existence of hell is combusting in the nation's preeminent Jewish theater. And that particular drama in that particular venue could not be more anomalous. There is in Juda…
Playwright Young Jean Lee's audacious title refers to the particular"the white widowed father (Ed) and his three grown sons (Drew, Jake, and Matt) who are on stage for most of this naturalis…
"We certainly didn't prepare ourselves for this," said Forum Theatre Artistic Director Michael Dove Monday night at the Silver Spring Black Box Theatre. He was addressing a packed house of f…
Having been watching a con man on the national stage for too long now, I found myself last night watching a con man on a local theater stage from an unusually timely point of view. To put it…
For the second show in his first season as artistic director of Theater J, the nation's largest and most prominent Jewish theater, Adam Immerwahr picked a play with the counterintuitive …
This beautiful play about black teenagers with bleak futures left me with such a melancholy sadness that two days later (on what was then Election Day?), it had not gone away. I share that n…
Among the adages that keep women put down and passive is the one that goes, "Good girls don't fight." It's a specious presumption that infects culture like an immobilizing toxin. It's an add…
Fans of STREB Extreme Action were out in force last night at The Kennedy Center. Enthusiasm in the Eisenhower Theater was at a fervor one might find at a rave or rock gig. The singular chore…
There's a delectable new musical in town celebrating a distinctive genre of music called Go-Go, and it's gotta be one of the most go-to fun times to be had in DC right now. The show is in th…
This seems to be the season in DC Metro Theater for pugilistic women. Women who box claimed the stage in Jen Silverman's Collective Rage (just closed at Woolly Mammoth Theater Company). A wo…
There comes a scene in Rameau's Nephew at Spooky Action Theater when Robert Bowen Smith playing He (the titular character) coughs an aria. Literally. Just like an opera singer except without…
You might say The Trump Card keeps getting dealt one new hand after another. Since Mike Daisey's monologue played to acclaim in August at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Donald Trump's ca…
I'd never been to Beertown, though I knew it by reputation as a must-visit burg. Folks had told me of this storied hamlet in the heartland where the local citizenry gather every five years t…
Like a gift that keeps on giving, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream keeps on rekindling. Dreamer after dreamer reconceives it as if anew. And last night that classic spark reignited at…
So far as I can tell, The Catholic University of America's Drama Department turns out a lot of local talent. I keep seeing mentions of it in program bios around town. Must be something go…
"Why can't we talk about anything real in school?" The question is posed by Solomon, a nerdy high school student and wannabe journalist, whose teacher has forbidden him to report on the topi…
