Back in December 2014 I had a conversation with the Director Kevin Finkelstein that has stayed with me. I had just seen his staging of A Klingon Christmas Carol, a one-night-only seasonal no…
You know that feeling you get when you go to something"you attend it as a visitor or you drop in as an interloper"and by the time that something ends, you feel as if you belonged to it? W…
To judge by social media, love and madness are a thing. Here are few choice examples now making the rounds in the meme-osphere: "Love is merely a madness…." (William Shakespeare) "There is…
There comes a moment early in Act One when Raymond, a young man who left his family in Rwanda to learn film making at NYU, returns to his homeland, which has become a devastation. The 100-da…
I left Winners and Losers thinking, Wow, there's more here than meets the eye. Or, as one of the performers said in an interview, "The show really bangs around in your head…." On the face …
I may have missed it, but to my knowledge no playwright in the current Women's Voices Theater Festival set out to write a feminist-socialist play and explicitly said so. (Not that there's an…
The intriguing tagline for Constellation Theatre Company's 2015/16 season is "Playtime for Grownups," which could not have been more appropriate on opening night of itsAvenue Q"the wholly hu…
saw this show last nite. LMAO. 2 funny. OMG. u G2G. So might read a hasty text from a self-absorbed hipster about Smartphones, the ridiculously delightful farce now playing at in a brisk and…
With a stand-up comedy act plus five skits, the laughs last Saturday at Straight Outta Hell"Next Day Theater's one-night-only sketch-comedy surprise"were well earned. Producer Matt Spangler …
I have now seen 26 entries in the Women's Voices Theater Festival, and six have shot to the top of my list in terms of writing I most admired. (I mean the playwriting itself, not the product…
When a particular company and a particular playwright hit it off such that they keep knocking it out of the park"as have The Keegan Theatre and Belfast-born Rosemary Jenkinson"theirs has to …
To date I have been to 20 productions and one staged reading that are officially in DC’s Women’s Voices Theater Festival (11 of which I have written about for DCMetroTheaterArts)…
When I saw the SeeNoSun OnStage production of Tracy Letts's first play, Killer Joe, a year ago June, I wrote a rave and called it "a powerful knockout of a show." So it was with keen anticip…
Hootenanny by Monique LaForce is a two-hander with an unsettling story up its sleeve. It's a story about a man and a woman that incrementally builds nerve-fraying psychological tension from …
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 enthra…
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 the play…
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 always…
After 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 voice …
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…
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 in th…
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 abduc…
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…
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 conver…
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 a …
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…