Puppets, people, props, projections, and sci-fi pop up a lot on DC stages, but not often with the narrative verve, literary cred, and nonstop wit of The Lathe of Heaven. Adapted and directed…
There’s a lovely scene just before intermission that is both heartwarming and heartbreaking. It is 1833 in agricultural County Donegal Ireland, and two star-crossed lovers"Maire (Saman…
“Who here is a feminist?” asked the Ring Announcer (Amelia Hensley). As she signed, wearing a bright red pantsuit and standing on a thick padded mat as used for a contact-sport m…
When the 2018 Women’s Voices Theater Festival comes to a close and the hits to emerge from it are tallied, Danai Guria’s comedy Familiar will surely be on the shortlist. Guria…
There is something heart-stirring and inspiring about this new one-man musical. In between excerpts from glorious hymns and spirituals, the great African American educator and orator Booker …
The reason I asked to interview Katie Kleiger is that after I saw her in Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves at Studio Theatre, I realized I had seen her on the same fourth-floor stage in Lu…
"What Mary Katheryn Nagle has given us on stage tonight is the history we don't learn," said renowned feminist author and organizer Gloria Steinem during one of the most buzzed-about talkbac…
A portrait of George Washington hangs in Ford’s Theater on the presidential box where Abraham Lincoln was shot. When you stop to think about it, this is an odd disconnect. Presumably f…
Kafka’s nightmare novel about a man named Joseph K"who is arrested, detained, and tried but never told what he has done wrong"would seem perfect for Synetic Theater’s magic touch…
A young Jewish American writer named Jonathan arrives by train in the Ukraine on a quest to find a woman named Augustine who helped his grandfather Safran escape the Nazis. He has only a fad…
Thornton Wilder’s allegorical paean to humanity’s survival “by the skin of our teeth” has itself become a marvel of endurance. First staged in 1942, when times were d…
Sex and guilt were linked in superstition before institutional Christianity came on the scene, but thanks to the medieval Catholic Church they got hooked up with theology too. It was in the …
Erika Rose's performance in Queens Girl in Africa is awesome to behold. She plays the playwright's teenage self, named Jackie, plus her parents, school friends, and others, with an incand…
When I saw the musical Amazing Grace I praised it to the skies. A blurb being used to promote the show is lifted from my review: "A gorgeous production of a glorious musical! Heart-stoppi…
“Let’s rethink sex” has suddenly become a thing. Well, not suddenly maybe. But it certainly has new pertinence in this era of full-frontal disclosure. Which made the th…
Dan Hoyle's extraordinary solo show The Real Americans is based on his travels through small-town America and the folks he met, many of them part of Trump's so-called base. When I reviewed t…
The production is lushly beautiful; the pacing, impeccable; the music between scenes, splendid; the acting, a delight in every detail. And the warm, piquant humor in this Jewish family drama…
Justin Weaks was recently named by the Washington Post one of DMV's 12 "stage dynamos," one of "the best of an emerging cadre of younger regional talent." He would have been on m…
Draw the Circle is no ordinary one-man show. Nor is it an ordinary autobiographical play. Because Mashuq Mushtaq Deen"its transgender playwright and solo performer"has a singularly fascinati…
A gorgeous production of a glorious musical in a grand new DC theater. What’s not to love? The new hall for performing arts is the 472-seat World Stage Theater, high up on the fifth fl…
By David Siegel and John Stoltenberg Post-Play Palaver is an occasional series of conversations between DC Metro Theater Arts writers who saw the same performance, got really into talking ab…
A tour de force performance by Thomas Keegan and masterful stage arts combine to make Solas Nua’s Misterman a jaw-droppingly good show. Directed and choreographed by Artistic Director …
The gutsy woman-centric theater company Nu Sass is notable for producing works that feature women in major roles, onstage and off, typically in a tiny second-floor space on F Street that sea…
A play from the 1980s about revenge for a rape, based on an ancient story from Greek mythology, comes alive in a student production as though it was about now. As though everything in it abo…
For anyone who is more than a little unnerved that President Trump might go off half-cocked and trigger a war"which he could do with as little thought as he puts into a tweet"this civic-mind…