744 stories by "John Stoltenberg"
When I left the Eisenhower Theater last night after witnessing this mesmerizing multimedia marvel, I had a quibble. I had just one, but it could be the most peculiar cavil I've ever had abou…
Lately I've been thinking that there are two key questions that must be asked of every season-programming choice by every theater's artistic director: 1) Why now? 2) So what? There is no sin…
F. Scott Fitzgerald was among the first to take an editorial whack at Ernest Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises (then called Fiesta). Among other things cut out by Fitzgerald was th…
I greatly admired both the writing and the acting in Shakespeare Theatre Company production of Mike Bartlett's King Charles III, but to be honest it was the character of Jessica and Michelle…
The very title poses a puzzle. How what? Why what? Yet the definite articles assert certitude. The what. The how. Turns out in this brainy play about two smart women, perplexity and uncertai…
A long-ago love story inspired this richly textured play with 1920s music. When Playwright Stephen A. Butler Jr. was growing up, he heard family stories about how his great-great grandparent…
Far off the radar of most grownup theatergoers, the writer/director Psalmayene 24 has been creating an extraordinary body of work for children. I've been an admirer of the trenchant work he …
Whatever this play meant to Broadway audiences when it debuted in 1941, just prior to America's entry into a war of resistance to fascism abroad, what matters now is what it means to audienc…
A man has a remote rustic fishing cabin. There are lot of fish in the water nearby. He's a rugged, outdoorsy guy and he loves to fish. In a Hemingway novel he would not be a fish out of wate…
There is a laugh track with this show. As in a prerecorded TV sitcom where the studio audience was cued to be amused, there's an overhead LAUGH sign that flashes intermittently accompanied b…
Don't groan but this is a bloody good show. It rocks, it roils, it's saucy and sassy, it's effin in-your-face. The story is gory as you might expect. It's about the legendary 1892 axe murder…
Lately the news has been resignifying theater more than usual. To resignify is not a commonly used verb but it's a commonly understood thing. It means "to give new signification to," to alte…
The title of Lisa Loomer's riveting play Roe refers to both the pivotal Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade and the person known as Jane Roe who was the plaintiff in it. Loomer dramatizes both st…
I love when a play starts out as a fascinating head trip"a smart, high-concept exhilaration of ideas"then propels me headlong into an overwhelming flood of emotion. It's like being transport…
Lucy Breedlove makes her professional debut playing the middle of three siblings in Lillian Hellman's 1941 play Watch on the Rhine. In the childhood they are having, the bogeyman is all too …
Queering Shakespeare may be gilding the lily. And if so DC these days has seen quite a few such embellished flowers. Like, golden nosegays for days. One of the best and freshest in the bunch…
The American theater has generated some great plays prompted by the tragic events of 9/11. I remember vividly Neil LaBute's powerful 2002 drama The Mercy Seat, in a production LaBute directe…
Someone Is Going to Come is a comedy of menace with a roiling undercurrent of sexual tension. It evokes ominous noirish goings-on in a scary remote locale told in stark idiosyncratic dialogu…
Tyler Bowman makes his Arena Stage debut playing the youngest of three siblings in Lillian Hellman's 1941 play Watch on the Rhine. The children have traveled with their mother and father to …
Just opened at Mosaic Theater Company in a thrilling and vibrant production directed by Natsu Onoda Power is a play that puts on stage some of what National Geographic just called the gender…
Ethan Miller makes his Arena Stage debut playing one of the three children in Lillian Hellman's 1941 drama Watch on the Rhine. It's is not what you'd call a kid's show. Set in 1940, the play…
Strange to watch a play unfold and wish that it did not feel so chillingly relevant. Or that the past it depicts never happened. Or that the moral and material uncertainty at its core di…
Theater in DC has begun only recently to tell stories that attempt to be faithful to trans experience. Despite progress on local stages toward accurate portrayals of the lives of other popul…
With the audience seated in the round on a floor shared by the playing space, you could feel the whole place shaking and quaking. It was no subterranean tremor; it was the ebullient Step Afr…
The year 2013, when the Supreme Court narrowly struck down the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional, has already faded from America's short-term memory but not so much as has 1996, th…
