744 stories by "John Stoltenberg"
A true story that begins with the desecration of a dead body becomes, before our eyes and hearts, a living and breathing buddy story. Dan O'Brien's The Body of an American is an intimate …
You know you're having an unorthodox experience in theater when there's a near absence of dramatic action in front of you but an epic interplay of ideas happening in your brain. So it goes i…
When Randy Baker told me he had directed a production of Lord of the Flies with a cast of mostly teenage girls, I knew I had to see it. William Golding's classic about British schoolboys who…
At the center of this beautifully ambiguous and hauntingly honest play is a sick infant. The baby is peculiar, perhaps mythically so, in that it glows like the moon. As we enter the theater,…
Believe it or not, this is one terrific piece of theater. It's a one-man play about an influential, world-class thinker that's every bit as smart, fascinating, and satisfying as the best suc…
There was a buzz of high energy as we walked into Ari Roth's office at the Atlas Performing Arts Center to meet with the Founding Artistic Director of the Mosaic Theater Company of DC. We wa…
Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine, which premiered in London in 1979, is rightly considered a landmark play. It's pivotal for me personally as well, ever since I saw the legendary Tommy Tune prod…
Inside the beltway bubble of local theater making, it's easy to forget how many U.S. citizens are indifferent, if not antipathetic, to live theater. Mainly they express this by voting with t…
Playwright Jennifer Haley has seen the future and it's The Nether, her cerebrally chilling thriller about future tech and future sex. Just opened at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in a fanta…
A prophet is not without honor except in his own country, among his own relatives, and in his own house," said a certain prophet of Nazareth long ago. Subtract the word "prophet," swap in "p…
Martin McDonagh is one my favorite living English-language playwrights and I'm not really sure why. His plays are hilarious and horrific at the same time. And I experienced that counterintui…
There is so much sorrow in this show Nine fine actors playing nine parents All mourning dead children Searching to see them again Seeking to be with them one more time Speaking words of unsp…
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," as Leo Tolstoy famously said. Had Tolstoy seen Studio Theatre's penetrating production of Deirdre Kinahan's lac…
Shakespeare Theatre Company has missed no opportunity to issue advisories to audiences about to attend the spectacularly intense Headlong production of George Orwell's 1984, now on stage at …
The theater term "packed house" took on all new meaning for me the night I caught this month's OpenStage New Works Showcase. Not only was there no empty folding chair; the show went on stage…
In politics, the expression "Marxist farce" could well be a slur hurled by some puerile and petulant presidential hopeful (you never know these days). In theater, however, the term "Marxist …
Even if you already know how inspiring and moving this show is, from seeing the film or the musical on stage, you are in for a spirit-lifting, heart-leaping, foot-stomping thrill when you ex…
There is a critical conversation going on in Anacostia right now that may be one of the most urgent and honest exchanges between black women and black men the American theater has ever k…
Last night in a small, tucked-away space in Silver Spring, I watched a "real time" drama so exciting and original, so drop-dead funny and knock-out suspenseful, that I left the theater dazed…
At a point in Mosaic Theater's Promised Land"a powerhouse of a play performed inside an intimate space that's more like a concrete bunker than a black box"we see the searing image of people …
"The situation in 1940s apartheid South Africa is very similar to what was seen in 1940's America, 1960's America, 1980's America, and even what we see in the present day." I was talking wit…
We enter a mini coliseum and take our seats on cushions of many colors on one of several rows of blue benches encircling the blank stage. The dim lighting feels hallowed; the music, reverent…
Last night I had the great satisfaction of watching Howard University students take on the challenge of a certifiably risk-taking play"Tarell Alvin McCraney's Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet"…
When I recently read Wendy Wasserstein's The Sisters Rosensweig, which opened in 1992, I sensed it was written in response to the women's movement at the time. Wasserstein's 1988 The Heidi C…
This play by Andrew Bovell in this 1st Stage production burned so many astounding images onto my brain"and sent into my ears so many searing exchanges"that my head is still spinning. For ins…
