744 stories by "John Stoltenberg"
I’ve been wary of this play since it was first produced in 1997. I remember hearing that it was about a pedophile and his niece and that its treatment of the uncle was sympathetic. So …
A few years ago, the teenage son of a single mom shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic, and now the nice suburban home they lived in is a blight. The house not only brings the neighborhood dow…
When three-hours-plus in the theater elapse faster than many a 90-minute performance, it’s a good bet you’ve been in the thrall of a master storyteller. And that’s what hap…
When Michael Kevin Darnall plays a character who is the focus of a long scene and we can watch every nuance and shading of his emotional expression without interruption, he can be transfixin…
Just before intermission in Constellation Theatre Company’s sparkling and stirring production of Aida, there comes a wonderful “Wakanda Forever” moment. The fearless Nub…
Countless migrant children have been separated from home and family in war-torn parts of the world, and there is no way all their stories will be told. But Naomi Iizuka’s Anon(ym…
Brave Soul Collective is a hidden gem of theatrical truthtelling about black men who are LGBTQ. Periodically the collective surfaces with a one-night-only showcase of work by local writing a…
I know from my feminist antipornography activism that there is plenty of misogynist hate literature around. (The hard-core stuff is brutal, sadistic propaganda marketed to men arousing them …
Theater Alliance’s The Events, now playing at Anacostia Playhouse, is one of several plays this season that deal with a mass shooting. (There’s also Pinky Swear’s Blight…
To paraphrase the famous Passover Seder line, “Why is this domestic drama different from all other domestic dramas?” Or, to put the impudent question another way, “What mak…
Count on Branden Jacobs-Jenkins to leave you whiplashed and shell-shocked. He hits nerve after nerve then goes for the jugular. Whatever he writes, see it. Woolly’s previous product…
Kennedy Center’s annual Page to Stage Festival is always chock full of tempting offerings, and the challenge of deciding what to see is daunting. It’s like an all-you-can-eat buf…
“You have everything you need within you to be human,” says an unseen guru on the god mic. He is speaking in a sonorous voice to six seekers who now sit rapt in a row facing us t…
Kennedy Center’s annual Page to Stage Festival is always chock full of tempting offerings, and the challenge of deciding what to see is daunting. It’s like an all-you-can-eat buf…
I could well make this a one-word review: Wow. After the sensational opening of Marie and Rosetta at Mosaic last night, wow was first word I heard from everyone I talked to, and wow was the …
Here’s an idea for a grad lit student in search of a dissertation topic:Â “Bewilderment and Brilliance in the Theater of Kathleen Akerley.” That thought flipped through …
“It gets better” is the premise and promise of a multimedia campaign that since 2010 has tried to offer hope and encouragement to LGBTQ+ youth. The message can be life-saving. Ne…
Happy Ending is a one-act satirical comedy written in the 1960s by Douglas Turner Ward, co-founder of the Negro Ensemble Company. He had written an op-ed for the New York Times called “…
Mike Daisey’s monolog The Story of the Gun is a show both hilarious and sobering, and he begins it with a wry riff on who we are who have come to see it. As he joshingly reminds us, we…
You know those big live TV versions of blockbuster musicals that get broadcast decades after the show was a hit on the stage? Like, not until generations have come and gone? Well in the case…
The prodigiously imaginative performance artist Holly Bass belongs to the first generation of her family not to pick cotton for a living. I learned that startling fact as I passed through an…
This comedy about bad theater and inappropriate backstage behavior is just gobsmacking good. Laugh-a-minute is an underestimation. Don’t miss it. Perfecting the Kiss, a production f…
Masterful monologuist Mike Daisey returns to DC to skewer with humor another burning issue of the day. This time it’s America’s thing about guns. What’s that all about, any…
On July 6, 2018, six girls ages 13 to 17 came together and began composing poetry and choreography and a little music about their just-starting-out lives. Two weeks later they performed the …
Race relations in the Deep South might not leap to mind as a promising topic for a laugh-out-loud comedy. But in Shopworn, premiering at Fringe, Playwright-Producer Derek Hills (who is wh…
