49 stories by "Mark Dewey"
Irish playwright Conor McPherson's Shining City raises a question about our demons: do we make them up to punish ourselves, or do they exist outside us in the world? For most of the play, th…
I expected Doug Wright's play I Am My Own Wife to be a different kind of Anne Frank story, one in which the heroine survives by hiding in plain sight. Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, the play's his…
I learned a lot from Jon Spelman's new monologue The Prostate Dialogues. I learned, for example, that prostate glands produce the inert component of semen, which is why all male mammals have…
In most ways, In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play gives us what we came to see, argue as we might that we didn't come to see that. You didn't? No! We thought it would be, like, a dramatic …
There was a lot of melding going on at Round House Theatre/Silver Spring last Saturday night " eras, genres, generations, linguistic styles, political paradigms " and some of the combination…
Brian Friel's play Faith Healer begins with a fact about reality that's difficult to process: sometimes the miracle will happen. Then what? "Faith healing is a craft without an apprenticeshi…
One thing I've always wondered about Shakespeare's Henry plays is why do Hal and Falstaff like each other so much? I understand that Falstaff sees a younger version of himself in Hal, with b…
Irish theatre and Irish music sometimes make me wonder if the Irish people have taken liberty with the English language in requital of the liberty that the English people took from them. Wha…
I'd like to say that Philip Ridley's new play Tender Napalm tells the story of two lovers trying to help each other recover from a traumatic event, possibly the death of their child, perhaps…
Director Gavin Witt's version of Twelfth Night, now at Center Stage, begins in the lobby, where clips from atmospheric movies like Casablanca, Sullivan's Travels, and Quai des Brumes play on…
Last week I came to a conclusion: the best way to increase the entertainment value of a mediocre play, like Timon of Athens, is to give it to a repertory theater company. They'll mix it in w…
One day, when Charles Fuller was in high school, he and a friend came across a poem by T.S. Eliot. "And it had this line," Fuller recalls. "'Do I dare disturb the Universe?'" He glances at t…
It seems reasonable to say that Jess Jung's production of Happy Days, a play of sorts by Samuel Beckett, is theater reduced to its bare essentials, or elevated to its bare essentials, or ref…
Richard III shouldn't work very well. It looks like a quest narrative, but nothing of substance stands between the anti-hero and his goal, so it's more like a project narrative. Not much dra…
I have two surprises to report. The first is that I liked Snyetic Theater's production of Twelfth Night. I didn't think I would, because it tells the story of Viola and Sebastian with moveme…
- in which we suggest a holiday trip to American Shakespeare Center in the lovely town of Staunton, VA nestled in the Shenendoah valley - I don't much see myself in Ebenezer Scrooge. He's Br…
Somehow I missed the beginning of Aaron Posner's Romeo and Juliet. Not the famous beginning — "Two households, both alike in dignity," — but the real one, which must have happene…
Molotov Theatre Group, named for the Soviet Foreign Minister who said his planes were delivering food to Helsinki when they were really dropping cluster bombs, sounds like a place where a pl…
To see Lucas Hnath's new play Red Speedo, you climb stairs from the second-floor gallery at Studio Theater, pass through a door into backspace, climb more stairs, pass through a door into th…
Story-telling conquers in She Stoops I know what I'm supposed to see in She Stoops to Conquer. The man who wrote the play, Oliver Goldsmith, also wrote an essay arguing that if we couldn't c…
Aaron Sorkin's play A Few Good Men is a military courtroom drama that invites us to ponder the role of justice in a realm where rank means right. But not seeing much to ponder there, I left …
As a busy man who likes to see a lot of theater, I might ask two questions about the current production of Romeo and Juliet at the American Shakespeare Center: why should I see that play aga…
Wonders Rattles Skeletons in America's Closet A Discourse on the Wonders of the Invisible World, the new play by Liz Duffy Adams, gets its water from the well Nathaniel Hawthorne used to gre…
Mark St. Germain's new play Scott and Hem in the Garden of Allah, which was commissioned by The Contemporary American Theater Festival, is the sort of historical fiction that gets its thrust…
H2O Brings Big Ideas to Life Good plays put people in circumstances that force them to confront essential questions; great plays move people past essential questions to a place where there's…
