744 stories by "John Stoltenberg"
There are reasons aplenty not to miss The Father now playing at The Studio Theatre, and Ted van Griethuysen’s performance in the title role is foremost among them. Recently the recipie…
Curious questions tease the brain during this peculiarly provocative production. One is: Is this theater? Another is: What are we to make of it? The Man Who, just opened at the estimably idi…
How does a play that starts out about real estate for gosh sake"adjacent farms in rural Ireland"become a heart-wrenching story of adjacent lost souls who fall in love late in life? How does …
DC site-specific theater of resistance reached a new height last night"also a new low"as Alliance for New Music-Theatre’s arresting staging of Vaclav Havel’s Protest became the f…
Much to my tickled surprise, last night I found myself shouting out that I am a lesbian"I along with an entire audience in Lab One at The Atlas Performing Arts Center! Really, all of us, abo…
Who’da thunk that our current administration’s dysfunction would prompt nostalgia for our eight years worth of W.? But that indeed is the curious takeaway from watching Lisa Hods…
I remember thinking after I first saw Lydia R. Diamond's Smart People at Arena that the character Jaysen Wright plays, Jackson Moore, has an important and particular role in how whole …
The dystopia delineated in Building the Wall is predicted by the playwright, Robert Schenkkan, to happen in America very soon. By the time the play is set, in the year 2019, the two char…
There are mysteries of belief and faith beneath this fascinating parable of a play, roiling like the seawater that churns below the wooden house where its action takes place. This house is b…
“I do believe you darkies are trying to kill me,” says Martha Washington to her house slaves in this fantastical-historical play, just opened in a sensationally cheeky production…
Racism, presumed in polite circles to be no laughing matter, gets a hilariously smart deconstruction in Lydia R. Diamond’s Smart People. Arena Stage has given this 2016 play its DC…
As play titles go, Or, is one of the most ungoogleable. It is a search engine dead end. And as an original mashup of past and present, prose and poetry, and performative purposes, Liz Duffy …
After I watched eleven B.F.A. candidates in Howard University’s Class of 2017 perform a program of self-scripted audition pieces"character-rich monodramas, actually"I had one overwhelm…
Until I saw Blood Knot at Mosaic Theater Company, I knew the work of Director Joy Zinoman only by reputation. I had come to her legend late. And the production blew me away. Set in apartheid…
DC Metro Theater Arts "More Local Performing Arts Coverage Than You'll Find Anywhere Else" Bruce Markowitz, Founder Joel Markowitz, Publisher and Editor Nicole Hertvik, Assistant Ed…
There are moments in this gripping, challenging, and deeply thought-provoking drama when the smallest of gestures by the two actors say what the play is about more than words can. A Human Be…
I lost count of how many orgasms are in this show. They keep, um, coming and coming. And each one is performed stunningly by a student actor with such precisely differentiated paroxysms and …
As the PETA-hounded circus left town on its farewell tour, I headed to the Atlas Performing Center to see Lucy, an UrbanArias opera about an actual chimp. I was reassured to learn that no an…
Even as fear and animus split the human race asunder, great authors have reminded us for millennia that we really are all one. From the ancient Roman playwright Terrence ("I am human, and no…
Director Leslie Jacobson has book-ended Shakespeare's dark tragedy King Lear with lyrical and lovingly-lit tableaux of the mad king's court as if in a fairy-tale photo op"Lear regal on his t…
I've seen some harrowing-to-watch theater in my time, but I recall nothing as excruciating as a particular scene in Dry Land, now running at Forum Theatre. The play by Ruby Rae Spiegel is se…
Post-Play Palaver is an occasional series of conversations between DCMetroTheaterArts writers who saw the same production"in this case the same two productions, Chekhov's Three Sisters and A…
"Social ills" is a term often used to name a problem without caring about the people affected by it"as in the phrase "racism and other social ills."Â It's a way of keeping one's distance …
Just now when the world is wracked with wave upon wave of ethnic animus"just now when our country has succumbed to xenophobia not seen on these shores for decades"there comes a work of t…
A shout-out to Studio Theatre co-founder Russell Metheny, who designed the complex on 14th Street, for installing a backstage stairway connecting the dressing rooms of the second-floor Milto…
