319 stories by "Robert Michael Oliver"
Ben Hoover’s Midlife explores that most difficult of theatrical terrains, human subjectivity. Not that subjectivity expressed by human babble, i.e., talking, of which America’s l…
An Octoroon, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ re-imagining of Dion Boucicault’s pre-Civil War classic The Octoroon, opened last night at Woolly Mammoth. Postmodern, hip, sardonic, farcica…
Fishamble: The New Play Company opened its “Tiny Plays for Ireland and America” last night as part of Ireland 100. Act I consisted of 20 short, Irish plays in 90 minutes, and eac…
Make no mistake about it. World War I kicked the crap out of patriotic idealism. Just ask Wilfred Owens. His “Dulce et Decorum et” is one of the most powerful denunciations of th…
Hedda Tesman, aka., Hedda Gabler, has it all: beauty, grace, status, ambition, wit, and feminine mystique. And, per usual, it’s the mystique that does her in. Studio Theatre’s He…
Phaeton, now on stage at Taffety Punk’s Capital Hill Arts Workshop, is a world premiere. Inspired by the Greek myth, the man-god Phaeton is granted one wish by his Helios father: he de…
In The Protean Self, Robert Jay Lifton explores the wonders of human resilience in times of profound disturbance and change. In Hkeelee (Talk to Me), a theatrical memoir of sorts…
Mary Zimmerman has mastered the stage adaptation, particularly of the classic tale, freely blending cultural forms and styles with hypnotic brilliance. Her Metamorphoses and Arabian Nights a…
Do you want to feel good? Do you want to forget for a couple of hours the political hate speech that’s currently filling the airways, or the vast economic inequality and the rise of a …
In the middle of Jennifer Haley’s beautifully poetic The Nether, now playing at The Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, the detective quotes Theodore Roethke’s “In a Dark Time:…
In the beginning was the Word–In the beginning was Reason–In the beginning was the Spirit. In the beginning was… Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy (he renou…
When you decide to be a dissident artist–think Paul Robeson–you’d better be willing to suffer the consequences. When you challenge a nation’s founding mythology, an e…
Family dramas are not rare; in fact, they are abundant; in fact, they dominate the theatrical landscape. Quality family dramas are rare, however: those that resound beyond their domesticity …
Let me admit this right from the start. I’m 60 years old. I don’t go to concerts much. I had heard of Green Day (I’ve worked with teenagers for decades), but had not listen…
Prepare to be assaulted! Head-on by Headlong Theatre’s 1984, now on stage at STC’s Lansburgh Theatre. George Orwell’s novel has become the iconic symbol of the totalitarian…
Vân-Ãnh Võ’s The Odyssey: from Vietnam to America conjures, to a Western audience, images of Odysseus, returning from victory at Troy, being punished by the gods, losing his a…
Cellist Rubin Kodheli joins the legendary performance artist Laurie Anderson on stage at The Terrace Theater for a presentation of her new multimedia work, the memory-haunting Language of th…
Before there was Desperate Housewives, before there was Sex in the City, before there was Thelma and Louise, there was the play, Crimes of the Heart. Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize winni…
On rare occasions the world of theatre and the world in which we live converge: the subject of the theatre we witness on the stage and the subjects we hear on the streets and on the news har…
Nick Payne’s Constellations embraces String Theory and its multiverses as it takes its intimate, in-the-round, Stage 4 audience on an emotional rollercoaster ride through the courtship…
Legacy Street, a new play by Lauren Jane Redmond, an MFA Playwriting candidate at The Catholic University of America, premiered last night at the Callan Theatre. A gritty look at violence in…
Rajiv Joseph’s Guards at the Taj, now playing at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, provokes its audience with grand flamingo visions, with horrific buckets of blood, with aesthetic debat…
Visit the Atlas Performing Arts Center’s Sprenger Lang Theatre over the next few week and you’ll find Gaza. "He who looks at the sea does not know the sea, He who sits on the…
Each year, Shakespeare is the most frequently produced playwright in America, and his A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the Bard’s most frequently produced plays. So if youR…
Chocolate Covered Ants, a new play by Steven A. Butler, Jr., and now on stage at the Anacostia Playhouse, is that rarity of theatrical experience in that it explores the psyche of the Africa…
