208 stories by "Susan Berlin"
A play as whimsical as William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale needs the audience to accept its premises if it's going to work at all. Washington's Shakespeare Theatre Company and director R…
The Keegan Theatre in Washington has been gaining a reputation in recent years for its fine work with musicals, and its joyful production of The Full Monty benefits from strong ensemble work…
Playwright Michael Hollinger took his inspiration from the symbiotic relationship between novelist Henry James and his longtime typist and later biographer, Theodora Bosanquet.
If the darker side of the play—the ruminations on loss and mortality—is muted in this reading, the humor is full-bodied and the staging is ingenious.
As part of its "Hero/Traitor Repertory," Washington's Shakespeare Theatre Company is offering audiences the chance to see a new adaptation of a seldom staged German drama.
Bill Cain, playwright and Jesuit priest, sees the Bible less as a rulebook that believers must follow than as a series of stories describing families and how they cope with life.
The Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington and director David Muse have succeeded in making this material accessible, anchored by the charismatic title performance of Patrick Page.
ason Robert Brown's painfully intimate story of falling into and out of love benefits from the polished performances of Erin Weaver and James Gardiner and the assured direction of Aaron Posn…
The last time monologist Mike Daisey visited Washington's Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, he shared some uncomfortable truths about the human cost to Chinese workers behind the sleek surface…
In The Mountaintop, receiving its Washington area premiere at Arena Stage's Kreeger Theater, playwright Katori Hall presents the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a flawed human being r…
Director Eric Schaeffer's rethinking of the work, now at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC, is still highly entertaining if less in-your-face, working with a cast of 16 (the ensemble comprise…
Naomi Jackson's glittering performance as the mercurial Mary Todd Lincoln is what makes Mary T. & Lizzy K., the biographical meditation now at Arena Stage's Kogod Cradle in Washington, worth…
In its effort to bring neglected 20th-century American plays back into the spotlight, American Century Theater in Arlington, Virginia, sometimes takes a step forward into the bizarre. One ca…
While the subject matter may seem forbidding—the clash between indigenous Africans and British colonizers in the late 19th century—the theme is very simple: how much of one's heritage ca…
laywright and director Joe Calarco ... returns to Signature—and to his examination of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet—with an intense, in-the-round production in the MAX Theatre.
Zimmerman's staging of several myths from Ovid's Metamorphoses has always centered around a pool—water symbolizing a medium for rebirth and change—but, for the first time, Zimmerman has …
Round House Theatre in Bethesda, Maryland, and director Mitchell Hébert have brought together a group of fine individual actors who create lightning when they work off each other as an ense…
Eugene O'Neill is most renowned these days for his epic dramas, but the production of Hughie now at the Shakespeare Theatre Company's Lansburgh Theatre in Washington, DC, offers an exquisite…
It's a jolting new direction for Olney, whose musicals have often seemed comfortably tradition-bound, and the first production since the company hired Jason Loewith (co-author of Adding Mach…
The crux of the drama is how much individuals should be expected to do for themselves in tough times, and what the surrounding community can and should do to help them.
Director Serge Seiden has ably orchestrated Guirgis' story of five people on the edge, trying to make their way through addiction, lack of trust, a tenuous economy, and additional everyday c…
MetroStage in Alexandria, Virginia, continues its string of polished music-based shows with the world premiere of Ladies Swing the Blues, which pays tribute to the work of the visionary alto…
Wilder's self-contained New England town stands in for the entire human community—as director Stephen Rayne stresses in his gentle production now at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC—and …
In the current production at the Folger Theatre in Washington, DC, director Robert Richmond and a hard-working cast of 13 actors create a visceral and hypnotic experience for the audience—…
The Show-Off, the current production of American Century Theater in Arlington, Virginia, is a comedy whose title character is very difficult to like.
