Michael Kahn, the Artistic Director, director and teacher whose work has dominated the theatrical landscape in Washington for thirty years and has had a national impact, will retire as Artis…
It is a bold writer who writes a history of the future. It is a bold writer who bathes his play in high Shakespearean language, replete with iambic pentameter and rhyming couplets. For doing…
It looks like a love story — a Heathcliff-and-Catherine love story, where the passion is so profound and misshapen that it obliterates the boundaries of everyday reality. But it isn…
Jean-Paul Sartre said that Hell is other people, but in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? we look to ourselves to find Hell, horrifying and intimate. George and Martha (Gregory Linington…
Yes, yes, I know; the family that slays together stays together. But why is it that of all the astonishing plays in Will Shakespeare’s oeuvre, it is this story of a homicidal Scottish …
Les Liaisons Dangereuses is like any play by Oscar Wilde, except when it isn’t. Wilde punctured the piety and pomposity of 19th-century England, to show us the underbelly of lust and g…
A play like this, where actors play fictional actors who play roles in an entirely different play, gives you a sort of double vision. You see not Joe Brack playing George Bailey, but Jake La…
In Alana Valentine’s Soft Revolution, Meera Narasimhan as Aunt Sarrinah cooks a feast of Afghani foods for herself and her niece Shafana (Nayab Hussain). After the production you will …
This may be the best thing you’ll see in theater all year, so hold on — to your hat, to your significant other, to your life. We are borne to the land; it is on land that we beca…
You are in Church. The magnificent voices of the choir (opening night was the Refreshing Spring Church of God in Christ James E. Jordan Jr. Choir) rise in song. You see them, in Theater J…
Playwright Sarah Ruhl, whose Eurydice has just closed at NextStop Theatre in Herndon, called upon writers to work “with new urgency” as she accepted the Steinberg Distinguishe…
In the ancient tale immortalized by Ovid, the great poet and singer Orpheus married a woman named Eurydice. Shortly after the wedding, a poisonous snake bit Eurydice, and she died. Orpheus w…
It is a brave company which takes on Hamlet, the most difficult play in the Bard’s canon and one of the most difficult plays in the English language. When done correctly, it yields not…
There is art, and there is proselytizing. Great art can contain proselytizing — if you doubt me, go to Round House this month — but proselytizing is not art. That, in a nu…
This isn’t Dante’s Inferno. It isn’t disco inferno either. I don’t know whose inferno this is. But it’s not Dante’s. Dante’s Inferno is a story of a…
All right. Let me get to the hard part first. Had Rhoda Lerman’s play, now being given a vigorous and effective production at Compass Rose Theater, simply been called A Secret Journey …
theatreWashington’s annual theatreWeek is with us again, and this year it’s lasting a little more than a week — until October 2. Thirty-four Washington-area theaters ar…
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, the DC-born playwright whose Appropriate and An Octoroon astonished audiences at Woolly Mammoth, has won a MacArthur Fellows Award — also know as a “geniu…
Excluding Shakespeare and holiday plays, eleven of the twelve plays being produced in America this season have either found a home in a DC-area theater or will do so soon. The most-produced …
The Stadium glows in the embrace of the fading afternoon Sun. The infield is as smooth and manicured as a billiard table. A cooling breeze floats in from the Potomac, wafting over the gorgeo…
Edward Albee, the seminal American playwright and three-time Pulitzer winner who is generally considered the greatest playwright of the latter half of the twentieth century, died yesterday a…
We know who Clive (John Scherer) is: square-jawed, middle-aged, sandy-haired with a splash of white at the temples, refined of voice, of imperial bearing — why, he is the very model of…
If you’re like me, you’ve already done your Christmas shopping, filled out your budget for the next fiscal year, and made arrangements for your final repose after The Even…
Here’s how you know you’re in a Martin McDonagh comedy: Father Welsh (Chris Strezin), Leenane Village’s dipsomaniacal priest, wanders into the fractious home of the Connor …
Trey Graham will headline as DC Theatre Scene makes its second annual appearance at the Smithsonian Associates’ preview of the upcoming theater year. Graham, the DCTS writer who won…