319 stories by "Robert Michael Oliver"
David Skeele’s The Margins opened this Saturday at Adams Morgan’s DCAC with its own brand of intimate terror. Take the small theatre — and I mean 45-person tiny; put 4 psyc…
Lights Rise on Grace, the world premiere by Chad Beckim, now playing at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, has all the elements of a compelling drama. The play takes us into the dynamics of an intricat…
“The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution (Paul Cezanne).” Today, that carrot is Charles Mee’s Utopia Parkway. On his websi…
During the Roman times, theatre was a savage sport: need a crucifixion, grab a slave. During the Dark Ages, theatre disappeared under the cloak of Catholicism: better to have no fun, if havi…
Lovers of poetry! Lovers of the long line! From his deck on The Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theatre, Diogo Infante calls, “Ahoy!” And the spirit of Alvaro de Campos, aka Ferna…
Over 2500 years ago, Aristophanes put “living” contemporary power-brokers into his comic masterpieces and then skewered them with their own foibles. The results were scandalous a…
To be sure, name a play Laugh and the gauntlet is thrown. Laugh or die trying. The Studio Theatre’s world premiere production of Beth Henley’s new play, based on the antics of si…
Sex. Love. God. Truth. People risk everything for them. They are eaten by lions. They are burned at the stake. They die on crosses. And did I mention politics, the arena where such…
Last night the audience at The Kennedy Center Concert Hall was blessed with Buika. If being blessed by Buika wasn’t more than enough for a single evening, the audience at the Concert H…
The Mundo Perfeito (Perfect World) has arrived in DC’s America. As part of the Iberian Suite. At The Kennedy Center. Presenting a full evening of theatre, Mundo Perfeito offers two pro…
The Creation of Art. The Wrestle with Death. 33 Variations, Moisés Kauffman’s Tony nominated play, juxtaposes those two turbulences. In one — circa 1820 in Vienna, Austria…
George Bernard Shaw wrote Back to Methuselah (A Metabiological Pentateuch) during World War I, with its assassination, its trench warfare, its chemical attacks, its all-too-human brutality u…
Strathmore brings a wide variety of performances to its spacious Music Center each month, from the Tango Buenos Aires: Song of Eva Perón, which performs there tomorrow, to the Annapolis S…
“I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass, if he go about t' expound this dream.” Bottom, A Midsummer Ni…
Make no mistake about it. August Wilson is one of America’s greatest dramatists. Authentic, historically rich, and dramatically insightful — few playwrights have the gifts and th…
In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell writes: "The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light." And, to be sur…
Fifty years ago this coming Thanksgiving, Arlo Guthrie and company take a truck load of garbage out of a friend’s house near Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Finding the local dump closed f…
As the guerilla war in Dunsinane intensifies, Siward, the English commander sent to Scotland to bring peace to the warring clans, admits to burning to death a village’s captured adult …
Frederic Schiller’s historical drama, Mary Stuart (1800), gives us two potent, yet vulnerable women, Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. It gives us religious fanaticism — no, n…
I write about theatre because I know theatre, intimately and over many years. I’m writing about Jazz because I love Jazz, the way a man might love a goddess, fleetingly and in hot purs…
In the hit TV sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon, Howard, Leonard, and Rajesh regularly play the on-line fantasy role playing game World of Warcraft. They also like to play dress up in the…
The great Chinese poet-philosopher ZhÅ«angzi (370-287 BC) wrote: “Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, …
You may not have heard of Terence Rattigan, British playwright whose heyday soared in the late 1940s and early 1950s; but whose more conventional fare was then swamped by the British bad boy…
In 1982, when Barry Levinson’s Diner (the film) opened nationwide to positive reviews, the Reagan Revolution had just begun, the Vietnam Syndrome was about to be dispelled with the inv…
No one should ever accuse The Studio Theatre of bowing to the pressure of getting into the holiday spirit. In this time of Islamic State and relentless “drones,” torture repor…
