Antiquity is in the house and what's old is new again. Taffety Punk is presenting two short theater pieces featuring its signature integration of dance, drama, and music based on voices from…
Dane Figueroa Edidi is one of DC's most original and multitalented theater artists. A dancer, actor, poet, playwright, and choreographer, she is also a teacher, novelist, political commentat…
A rom-com about manhunting…at Mosaic? That's probably not the sort of fare you'd expect from DC's preeminent theatrical platform for social-justice programming. But who is to say that fair…
It was nearly 70 years ago that Carson McCullers adapted her beloved 1946 novel The Member of the Wedding into a prizewinning Broadway play. Set in a small Southern town, the story centers o…
The circusy-party vibe begins before showtime. The place is festooned with streamers, furnished with comfy sofas, bedecked in colored light, and stocked with bags of popcorn to share. A …
One night five years ago, a horror happened in Chibok, North Eastern Nigeria. The Boko Haram"Islamicist terrorists who believe that Western education is evil"abducted 276 girls from the scho…
The set foreshadows the coming fracas. There's a fault line down the middle where this living room seems sliced in two. And something's out of whack. The halves do not align. Like two st…
Three retired nuclear physicists meet in a quaint cottage not far from the nuclear power plant where they once worked and where a catastrophe has occurred. Earthquake, tsunami, tidal wave, r…
It is rare that theater seriously asks us to believe something far beyond itself. Typically we are asked to suspend disbelief about let's-pretend that happens on stage. The gripping and insp…
Even in this theater town abounding in innovation, The Tarot Reading stands out as an original. I can't think of anything it's quite like. After I saw an iteration last year (The Tarot Readi…
Fifty years ago Rolling Stone reported completion of a new album by Pete Townshend and called it "probably the most important milestone in pop since Beatlemania. For the first time, a rock g…
I have an ongoing interest in how theaters in DC with predominantly white audiences raise and represent the issue of race. And one of the things I've been noticing is how the white comfort z…
The splashy opening is spectacularly preconception-smashing. We know we're about to see a play premised on a 1953 meeting in a Paris café between the literary lion Richard Wright and James …
Actor and Playwright Liza Jessie Peterson is an extraordinary artist/activist. Tucked inside her uproarious one-woman show, The Peculiar Patriot"which she performs through April 20, 2019, at…
"When did money become the thing " the only thing?" asks an ambitious young financial journalist in her opening monologue. She then answers her own question: "The mid-eighties. 1985 to be ex…
When Pinter is performed with precision, with exacting attention to the text"as is the case with Scena Theatre's razor-sharp Pinter Rep"the effect can be both unnerving and exhilarating. The…
American theater blows off a lot of folx. Leaves out their voices. Doesn't cast them. Isn't interested in their stories. Two-Spirit indigenous transpeople, for conspicuous instance, are amon…
When one has an overwhelming experience in the theater"as I did watching Native Son at Mosaic"it can take some time to process. This is especially so if the work is unlike anything one thoug…
There's a lot that's shocking and disturbing in this show, as well there should be"it's based on the April 20, 1999, shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. That massacre"d…
There is indeed a dog in this play, aptly named Dog, wryly performed by Karen Lange wearing a plaid shirt, jeans, and neck bandana. At the top of Act One, Dog sings a country-westernish song…
We are seated on folding chairs in the living room of an actual house where two women and a man in their mid-twenties have agreed to meet up for a three-way. There's a modest playing area fo…
Queen of Basel by Hilary Bettis, now on the boards at Studio, is scathingly brilliant. One walks out gobsmacked. (I completely concur with my colleague Bob Ashby's astute review.) But watchi…
Hexagon has been around for 64 years and never seems to age. Since 1956 the musical comedy theater group has been turning out original political satire that's as of-the-moment as the news. I…
The circus I fell in love with as a kid is gone. It was touted at the time as the greatest show on earth: a three-ring tented extravaganza that smelled of roasted peanuts, sawdust, and manur…
The title of this show, if you have never heard of it, doesn't mean what you might think. It's not about fitness. It's not about sex. It's a country-western musical about ten hard-up Texans …