I went to see O Monsters, the radically abstract production created by Philadelphia's New Paradise Laboratories, now playing in the Kogod Cradle at Arena as one of five curated productions i…
The theater students at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, MD, are a plucky bunch. When the school had no funds for production, they organized as a club and got a budget from the Stud…
Actor-Writer-Revolutionary Meshaun Labrone has done it again. Two years ago he brought back Power! to Fringe. That drama about Stokely Carmichael I called “one of the best-written,…
The all-volunteer organization Hexagon, “DC’s only original political satirical musical comedy troupe,” has been around since 1955 and has long been a Fringe fan fave. Its …
Count Shaun Michael Johnson among the stunning new talents to be discovered at Capital Fringe. His solo show, Sobriety of Fear, is a tour-de-force of empathic acting. With breathtaking emoti…
Happenstance Theater, the much-lauded purveyors of cheekily sophisticated whimsy, have brought another original devised work to Fringe, and if it doesn’t tickle your funny bone, you mi…
The boarding house play is a staple in theater. Assorted folks who might otherwise never cross paths are thrown together by a playwright who then grips us with their backstories, intertwined…
Community engagement is a noble aspiration for a lot of theaters around town. The challenge is to make theater matter to folks who live in the nabe. To connect the institution to the communi…
The murderous race hate that killed young Emmett Till in 1955 is alive and well. The impunity with which white assailants get away with it is still much with us. And the irony is that the ic…
I went to see Other Life Forms, the new comedy at Keegan Theatre, not expecting to write about it. But the play changed my mind. I wasn’t even home yet when on an impulse I tweeted …
The Emperor of Atlantis"an operatic takedown of autocracy"is relevant to our times in freaky and haunting ways. And its backstory is chilling. Near the end of World War II, the Czech compose…
The gender-flip trope has been a staple on stage for much of theater history, and just when you thought it had been trotted out every which way imaginable, along comes a delightful surprise.…
The vagrant of the title is a Palestinian scholar named Adham who, while on a trip to London as a grad student, must decide, when war breaks out in his homeland, whether to stay or go. Will …
Jon Hudson Odom’s performance in Botticelli in the Fire just blew me away. And it wasn’t the first time that had happened. I’ve been following his work for several years…
Step Afrika!, the acclaimed African American dance company, launched this powerful multisensory dance-theater work eight years ago. Since then the spectacular show has toured the world and h…
At a historical moment when appalling new waves of gender fundamentalism sweep our nation, leaving bigotry and violence in their wake, it was beyond refreshing to hear the Gay Men’s Ch…
The musical The Scottsboro Boys tells a true story of heinous injustice driven by race hate, and the theatrical form is a minstrel show"bouyant upbeat dancing, rousing melodic singing, and b…
The mystery at the center of this adroit drama keeps getting mysteriouser and mysteriouser: What’s in the small room at the top of the stairs? Playwright Carole Fréchette has crafted …
Going back to Ancient Greece, theater has functioned as a forum for informed public debate"about war, religion, politics, all the issues relevant to the citizenry of the day. The Greeks had …
Among the rich offerings in The Kennedy Center’s Artes de Cuba festival were two extraordinary works of theater, each performed but twice: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, from Teat…
They have such a tasteful, immaculate, picture-perfect kitchen, how could their marriage be such a sorry mess? That’s a crass way to ask the question, but the answers are beautifully n…
I would not have thought that a play about dreadful disaster could be done as a droll and delightfully dark comedy, but Playwright Gabrielle Reisman did. Having lived through Hurricane Katri…
Obsessional unrequited love is what prompts Petra von Kant’s bitter tears in the 1972 German film by Rainier Werner Fassbinder. The movie is a languid immersion in the self-absorption …
In a tent pitched on a pier overlooking the Anacostia River, there is a powerfully important work of theater being performed. The work is The Frederick Douglass Project, commissioned to comm…
The sudden incapacity of their mother is the occasion for three siblings and their cousin to gather at a Boston hospital in Amy Leigh Horan’s touching and perceptive new family dramedy…