Even in this theater town abounding in innovation, The Tarot Reading stands out as an original. I can't think of anything it's quite like. After I saw an iteration last year (The Tarot Readi…
Fifty years ago Rolling Stone reported completion of a new album by Pete Townshend and called it "probably the most important milestone in pop since Beatlemania. For the first time, a rock g…
I have an ongoing interest in how theaters in DC with predominantly white audiences raise and represent the issue of race. And one of the things I've been noticing is how the white comfort z…
The splashy opening is spectacularly preconception-smashing. We know we're about to see a play premised on a 1953 meeting in a Paris café between the literary lion Richard Wright and James …
Actor and Playwright Liza Jessie Peterson is an extraordinary artist/activist. Tucked inside her uproarious one-woman show, The Peculiar Patriot"which she performs through April 20, 2019, at…
"When did money become the thing " the only thing?" asks an ambitious young financial journalist in her opening monologue. She then answers her own question: "The mid-eighties. 1985 to be ex…
When Pinter is performed with precision, with exacting attention to the text"as is the case with Scena Theatre's razor-sharp Pinter Rep"the effect can be both unnerving and exhilarating. The…
American theater blows off a lot of folx. Leaves out their voices. Doesn't cast them. Isn't interested in their stories. Two-Spirit indigenous transpeople, for conspicuous instance, are amon…
When one has an overwhelming experience in the theater"as I did watching Native Son at Mosaic"it can take some time to process. This is especially so if the work is unlike anything one thoug…
There's a lot that's shocking and disturbing in this show, as well there should be"it's based on the April 20, 1999, shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. That massacre"d…
There is indeed a dog in this play, aptly named Dog, wryly performed by Karen Lange wearing a plaid shirt, jeans, and neck bandana. At the top of Act One, Dog sings a country-westernish song…
We are seated on folding chairs in the living room of an actual house where two women and a man in their mid-twenties have agreed to meet up for a three-way. There's a modest playing area fo…
Queen of Basel by Hilary Bettis, now on the boards at Studio, is scathingly brilliant. One walks out gobsmacked. (I completely concur with my colleague Bob Ashby's astute review.) But watchi…
Hexagon has been around for 64 years and never seems to age. Since 1956 the musical comedy theater group has been turning out original political satire that's as of-the-moment as the news. I…
The circus I fell in love with as a kid is gone. It was touted at the time as the greatest show on earth: a three-ring tented extravaganza that smelled of roasted peanuts, sawdust, and manur…
The title of this show, if you have never heard of it, doesn't mean what you might think. It's not about fitness. It's not about sex. It's a country-western musical about ten hard-up Texans …
We like to think that the Holocaust could never happen here. We want to believe that it shouldn't so it couldn't. And then comes along a work of theater like Crying Hands that screams out ho…
When we see an unwell homeless person on the street"these days huddled in layers of rags against the cold"we can know nothing of the story of who they are and how they got there. All we can …
Raymond O. Caldwell kicks off his new Producing Artistic Directorship at Theater Alliance with a production of Dominque Morisseau's Blood at the Root that is bursting with youthful exuberanc…
"Will I be missed?," the young man wonders aloud as he surveys the thirtysomethings who have gathered in his Manhattan apartment for a party after his funeral. "Did it matter that I was here…
The ReykjavÃk conjured up in Steve Yockey’s new play ReykjavÃk is not the family-friendly destination the Iceland tourist bureau might try to sell you. But if you’re 18 or …
BLKS is gonna be a blockbuster. Let’s get that out of the way. BLKS is a rapid-fire, laugh-out-loud comedy about a quartet of twenty-something black women in New York City who are room…
“You have to be a good Arab,” says Morad Hassan of the stigma he faces trying to have a career as an Arab actor in Israel"the very country where, he says, “we are the Jews …
“You fucked up! You fucked up! You fucked up!” rails the older brother, berating the younger. “You fucked up! You fucked up! You fucked up!” he goes on, as if he cann…
Cross-racial casting can be totally wrongheaded"as when white actors impersonate characters of color. It can also be speciously universalizing"as when actors of color play all the parts in a…