Four African American women address the audience as if speaking to a department store clerk. Each is shopping for a dress"a dress, they stress, that must be "special." As they turn to the fa…
In honor of the Czech dissident, political prisoner, and playwright Václav Havel, Alliance for New Music-Theatre has served up a two-course theatrical repast in DC's most outré new arts …
This world premiere comic drama about gays in the military takes us back to July and August of 1964 when LBJ was ordering American ground troops into Vietnam in response to the Gulf of Tonki…
Academia has inspired several thematically penetrating plays featuring female protagonists"the two teachers falsely accused of being lesbian lovers, for instance, in Lillian Hellman's 1934 T…
On the day after opening night of Everybody, the first show in Simon Godwin's much heralded first season as artistic director of Shakespeare Theatre Company, I visited him in his office to a…
Tiramisù"the caffeinated confection from Italy"translates as "pick me up" or "cheer me up," which makes it the perfect name for the hilarious new solo show Michael Burgo brought to DC Art…
Right to Be Forgotten is a play written from the outside in. By that I mean, its intention is to illustrate a legal issue: the tension in U.S. law between privacy and freedom of speech, a te…
To realize how much white America loved minstrelsy is a reckoning painful or shameful, depending on one's ancestry. Minstrel shows were never meant for people of African descent to see; they…
Editor's note: Woolly Mammoth Theatre, in conjunction with its staging of Jackie Sibblies Drury's Fairview, has brought to DC a show produced by the Harlem-based Movement Theatre Company tha…
How does that new GalaPro app work? How well does it work? And what's it like to watch a show with it? This inquiring theatergoer wanted to know. Many Deaf and hard of hearing people are alr…
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Midway through this taut, fraught drama about sexual trauma, a woman named Ana, a wife and young mother, is suddenly triggered. We are not told exactly why. It might be the Kavanaugh hearing…
Can one laugh heartily at a satirical comedy"be thoroughly engaged by the entertaining characters, story, and performances"and then after it's over mourn what it was about? That was for …
Sitting in the front row in a child-size chair, I watched a puppet show based improbably on a play by Tennessee Williams. The occasion was a preview at Spooky Action Theater of a never-befor…
Whether you're an avid reader or a theater buff or both, there's a supersmart, superfunny show up in Silver Spring that should be on your short list. Marking its 52nd anniversary (!), commun…
I saw Jackie Sibblies Drury's Fairview opening night at Woolly, and I cannot stop thinking about its originality"not only in form but in intent. I'm not writing about the production"my colle…
When Heidi Shreck steps out onto the Eisenhower stage and has what seems an informal, ad-libbed, introductory chat with us, the first thing you notice is her joy. She seems genuinely happy t…
It isn't every day you see a play that merges Becket and Martha Graham. That's my takeaway from watching the hybrid form of Surfacing play out at the Atlas: Three actors are strictly circums…
"How does a black boy become an American?" asks spoken word artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph. "How does he learn his role to play?" For Joseph the question is personal and visceral. In The Just an…
The bar is open and there's 100-proof theater on tap. It's a stirring play about an Irish immigrant bartender, and it's shaking up a classy new cocktail bar where only 30 patrons at a time c…
It takes a certain talent to turn topics that are no laughing matter into laugh-out-loud comedy that doesn't condescend, doesn't ridicule, and yet imbues life with meaning as only art can. T…
Back in 1998, the official Enron vision and values statement had a line in it that said: "Ruthlessness, callousness, and arrogance don't belong here." Two years later, as the company's stock…
The animus being whipped up against "invaders" at our southern border lends Naomi Wallace's 1993 The War Boys an unsettling resonance. Written when she was but 26, the play is about three me…
"There are holes in the script!" would be the deathblow for any more conventional work of theater, but in Nassim Solimanpour's Blank, the gaps are where the action's at. As with Solimanpour'…
Liz Duffy Adams's play Or,"which premiered in 2009 at the Women's Project in New York"is a deliciously literate feminist farce. A radical mashup of dichotomies (among them straight and gay, …