The Ethan McSweeny-helmed Twelfth Night currently at Shakespeare Theatre’s Harman Hall is the darkest, most melancholy production of a Shakespearean comedy I have ever seen. You too, I…
The business of an artist is not much different than the business of a baseball umpire, though his field of vision is bigger. The artist must see the world, and then call it as he sees it. T…
The Paul Selig play that Edge of the Universe Players 2 is now performing in the Woolly Mammoth rehearsal space could, with justice, be called Five Interesting Women, Some of Whom Have Issue…
The real trial of the 20th century did not involve some imbecile driving a Bronco in a low-speed chase. Instead, it happened nearly a hundred years ago. In it, the greatest trial lawyer in A…
Author’s note: The following is an account of the Scopes Monkey Trial, the real-life inspiration for Inherit the Wind. If you are unfamiliar with either the trial or the play, I re…
A political rival once said of the famed French foreign minister, Talleyrand, that he “would sell his soul for money and he would be right, for he would be exchanging dung for gold.…
In 1939, the S.S. St. Louis set sail from Hamburg for Cuba with 937 passenger, most of them German Jews hoping to begin new lives away from the Nazis. Their hopes were based on a Cuban law w…
There are hardly any travelling salesmen now, and yet we are almost all Willy Loman. We remember the home run we hit to win the big game in high school, when in fact we rode the bench at P.S…
Nothing succeeds like excess, Oscar Wilde once wrote, and nowhere is that more true than in America. We are the land that invented competitive eating; when the Olympics finally welcomed prof…
Harrowing, chilling and profound, Lela and Co. is a story about the stories we tell ourselves in order to keep sane, or in order to protect the status quo, or in order to be polite —…
Duane Johnson, who sexually assaulted Tricia McCauley and then murdered her as she tried to fight him off, has entered a plea agreement under which he will serve thirty years in prison for f…
An arsonist is an artist of obliteration; a wizard at turning matter to energy, and then dissipating the energy until it is nothing. Where before the arsonist came there was a home, a painti…
The Quotidian Theatre way-back machine will be in full operation this season, as the company’s four-play season starts in the present (or near-present) and catapults us back in time, l…
Shakespeare is our North Star because every time we do one of his great plays, it is an opportunity to rethink our assumptions, as they define our present selves. I first saw Othello in 1969…
It will be time for the Women’s Voices Festival next January, but at Falls Church’s Creative Cauldron, every play in its 2017-2018 season will be an examination of the experience…
WSC Avant Bard will bring some familiar names — in one case, in a whole new play — into its three-production 2017-2018 season. Lauren Gunderson (I and You) brings us the life and…
Silver Spring’s Forum Theatre will produce four plays — one of them yet to be announced — in a season which features the human struggle against the crushing forces of conve…
Anacostia’s Theater Alliance, which scored big earlier this past June with the debut Mollye Maxner’s devised play, Still Life With Rocket, will do itself one better this year, wi…
The 4615 Theatre Company has joined the ranks of full-time producing DC-area theaters this year with a four-production schedule balanced between classic and contemporary stories. The Silver …
Night Seasons is forty years in the history of the unpleasant Weems family, reduced to two hours, more or less. Notwithstanding this compression, the two hours traffic of our stage seems lon…
When we are young we do not hide our naked souls from the Godlike scrutiny of our parents, so we do not lie about our thinking. We lie only about our acts. Since we are all sinners, our acts…
Four hundred years ago, William Shakespeare wrote a play about a King four hundred years before him, and thus in King John we are thrust into a barely imaginable past, before the invention o…
There are surprisingly few one-actor musicals. Even rarer: solo musicals where the protagonist juggles razor-sharp daggers. Make your one-actor, dagger-juggling musical about a lesbian circu…
This year the Contemporary American Theater Festival, like the nation itself, has given itself over to political conflict. Whether we are in the classroom, or a Nazi interrogation chamber, o…
Wild Horses is the story of a thirteen-year-old girl making bad choices, in the company of her close friends, who also make bad choices, and of their bad-choice-making associates. She has ba…