In the week following Ari Roth's firing as Artistic Director of Theater J, I talked with him about his vision of theater. It was a topic that mattered to me personally, because I had come to…
Graphic language can slam us and disturb us in a way that is unique to live theater. Visceral and muscular diction in performance can burn images into our mind's eye as no cinema can. The po…
This is a big play," the playwright Tony Kushner has said without understatement, and without an argument from anyone. It's sprawling and sweeping and awesome in depth and breadth. It's also…
Love and song go together so well they're a compound noun. Who doesn't love a love song? But what about love that is disappointing, unreciprocated, wounding"all the loves that dare not speak…
Hit Musical Visible Language to Livestream on HowlRound TOMORROW, NOVEMBER 16, 2014 AT 2 PM WSC Avant Bard and the  Gallaudet University Theatre and Dance Program announce today that t…
The Rainbow Theatre Project, Metro DC's very own LGBTQ theatre company, has just begun its second season. If that sounds intriguing but you've never heard of it, small wonder. As H. Lee Gabl…
Bad Jews beggars genre naming. "Comedy of ideas" doesn't hold a Shabbat candle to it. Bad Jews is so over-the-top funny, so razor-sharp smart, and so plumb-the-depths profound that it left m…
Washington Stage Guild starts off its 29th season with a smart production of David Marshall Grant's Pen, a curious play that is by turns provocative and perplexing. The company's tagline, ap…
There is a shortlist of great American plays about hopes and dreams, wrenching and emotionally exacting dramas exposing the anguish when righteous aspiration is tragically not enough. Arthur…
This is what Jon Fosse's words sound like. When he writes it sounds like this. His characters talk in short statements. They talk and they seem to say something ordinary. They seem to. One w…
I last partook of this tasty audience-integration treat from dog&pony dc last December when I saw Toast as a workshop production in the Kogod Cradle Series. The immersive experience was …
A Conversation With 'Yentl' Playwright Leah Napolin Leah Napolin's Yentl would have to be on any short list of best plays about religion and gender"and the production now at Theater J would …
As a short story by Franz Kafka awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, it found itself onstage transformed into a live action graphic novel. Wait, what? Translation: The adventurous Alliance …
I've been crazy about Amy Herzog's writing since I saw 4000 Miles last year at Studio Theatre. When I saw After the Revolution at Theater J last season, I just flipped. Herzog is, as I said …
In Theater J's beautiful, eloquent, and thrilling new production of Yentl, such profound new life has been breathed into Isaac Bashevis Singer's beloved novella that at its heart this …
The distinctive work of playwright Alan Sharpe returned to the Page-to-Stage Festival Saturday night with a reading of six short plays collectively titled Hand Jobs, presented by the…
After the entertaining staged reading at last year's Page-to-Stage Festival of Mario Baldessari's comedy The Good Devil, In Spite of Himself (coauthored with Tyler Herman), I called it in my…
William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale is a play I'd never seen or read or even known a thing about. So the experience of discovering it via The Shakespeare Theatre Company's smashingly goo…
What a kick to see this Capital Fringe hit back at it, better and badder. When 1814! The War of 1812 Rock Opera tore up the sweltering Baldacchino Tent in the summer of 2013, DCMetr…
This is a cunning conundrum of a play. It moves back and forth in time, sudden lighting changes signal shifts from realistic to magical, the characters speak like superliterate savants, one-…
(Editor’s note: This column represents the views of its author only and does not reflect the views of myself or the staff of DCMTA.) A new book about the Matthew Shepard murder challen…
Ardent fans of Cirque du Soleil attending the spectacular new Amaluna will recognize this as one of Cirque's best tent shows ever. Now in its 30th year with a track record of more t…
At the core of this inexorable and engrossing drama by Johnna Adams is a disturbing enigma: A fifth-grade boy named Gidion, suspended from school under suspicious circumstances, has shot him…
About an hour into The Other Day as performed at The Shop, a Dutch airport clerk named Steven (played by a very dashing Dash King), shows a young American named Mark (a puppy-dog-sweet…
(Best of the Capital Fringe) What a pleasure to happen upon this gem of a show. Featuring three exceptionally truthful and touching performances on a plain platform with next-to-no productio…