319 stories by "Robert Michael Oliver"
Eleanor Burgess’ The Niceties is a political play that takes the gloves off. It’s bare knuckled and it’s bloody, though no bones are broken and no souls crushed. But who kn…
Evan Linder's Byhalia, Mississippi pulls theatre-goers into familiar territory: the “white trash” world of Laurel and Jim. Once there, however, the unfamiliar takes shape: amidst…
David Meyers' We Will Not Be Silent places American audiences within an interrogation room in Nazi Germany in 1943. Leaders of the White Rose, one of several resistance groups to Hitler and …
Last year there was Not Medea; this year there is Wild Horses, Allison Gregory's rollicking one-woman ride through a 13-year-old's adventures in horse country. Though structurally not as wel…
I am not a specialist. I’ve never wanted to be a specialist. In fact, I’ve always wanted to be a non-specialist: someone who encounters life across many disciplines and many love…
A Source Festival Artistic Blind Date brings together three area artists of different disciplines for an adventure in performance art. In five months they need to create and perform a perfor…
Stepping back 45 years, America is in the midst of a social revolution, and feminist consciousness-raising sessions are underway. Radical feminists, cultural feminists, and political feminis…
Mosaic Theatre Company of DC concluded their 2017 season with a riveting, deeply provocative examination of a State’s National Security apparatus on dissident individuals living and lo…
One of the elements of the Source Festival 2017 is two Artistic Blind Dates. These collective creations bring together area artists from different disciplines to devise an original performan…
Last night, Gilad Evron’s Ulysses on Bottles opened the Mosaic Theater Company’s 2017 Voices From a Changing Middle East Festival. Described as an allegory, Evron’s Ulysses…
Joe in Michael Milligan’s one-man show Mercy Killers is, indeed, your average Joe: he listens to Rush Limbaugh, he works on cars as a mechanic, he has no college degree, and (yes) he p…
Some plays are more difficult to watch than others; some plays activate your imagination and pull you into their stories whole-body: those plays pull you into the psychological realities the…
The spectacle of movement has always been Synetic’s star attraction. When those primal, emotional moments fuse with a strong narrative throughline, Synetic’s brilliance shines br…
One Thousand and One Nights, the collection of classic Islamic tales upon which Mary Zimmerman built The Arabian Nights, now playing at Constellation Theatre Company, could not have a more v…
I didn’t know that Laura Bush had killed a guy. It really had never crossed my mind. Well, after seeing Ian Allen’s Laura Bush Killed a Guy, now playing at the Klunch at Caos …
With the Maly Drama Theatre’s Three Sisters, playing through April 30 at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theatre, theatre lovers will feast on every slow motion wonderment, every…
As soon as the lights come up on Lydia R. Diamond’s Smart People, now playing at Arena’s Kreeger Theater, the focus is clear. Or is it? Are four really “smart” people…
First of all, for theatre lovers, there is nothing as delightful as watching three top notch actors have fun on stage, and with Holly Twyford, Gregory Linington, and Erin Weaver you’ll…
As soon as the Trio finished Thelonius Monk’s “Brilliant Corners”, the KC Jazz Club exploded in applause. Some music is not listened to: it is experienced, your body vi…
About midway through Mosaic Theater’s A Human Being Died That Night, Eugene de Kock, serving two life sentences for murder and assassination, turns to his interviewer, Pumla Gobo…
George Bernard Shaw loves words. Even his stage directions are wordy. He also loved ideas, philosophy, aesthetics, politics… In Back to Methuselah Part 3: As Far as Thought Can Reach, …
In The Empty Space Peter Brook declared that the stage has "two rules: (1) Anything can happen and (2) Something must happen." In Battlefield, his collaboration with Marie-Hélène Estienne,…
Sometimes a story is so unique it needs no explanation. Sometimes a story dares you to disbelieve. Sometimes a story… Where Can I Find Someone Like You, Ali? is such a story. And as wr…
As the audience gathers in the Eisenhower, antique footage rolls on the screen: people gathering, moving, marching. José MartÃÂ, Cuban national hero, poet, and revolutionary flashes on th…
One hundred years separate the young women in What Every Girl Should Know and Dry Land, now playing in rep at Forum Theatre. In Monica Byrne’s What Every Girl Should Know,Ã…
