Friday, April 26, 2019
Fifty years ago Rolling Stone reported completion of a new album by Pete Townshend and called it “probably the most important milestone in pop since Beatlemania. For the first time, a rock…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:13PMMonday, April 22, 2019
I have an ongoing interest in how theaters in DC with predominantly white audiences raise and represent the issue of race. And one of the things I’ve been noticing is how the white comfort…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:56PMWednesday, April 17, 2019
The splashy opening is spectacularly preconception-smashing. We know we’re about to see a play premised on a 1953 meeting in a Paris café between the literary lion Richard Wright and Jame…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:11PMSunday, April 14, 2019
Actor and Playwright Liza Jessie Peterson is an extraordinary artist/activist. Tucked inside her uproarious one-woman show, The Peculiar Patriot—which she performs through April 20, 2019, …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:52PMSaturday, April 13, 2019
“When did money become the thing — the only thing?” asks an ambitious young financial journalist in her opening monologue. She then answers her own question: “The mid-eighties. 1985 …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:08PMTuesday, April 9, 2019
When Pinter is performed with precision, with exacting attention to the text—as is the case with Scena Theatre’s razor-sharp Pinter Rep—the effect can be both unnerving and exhilaratin…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 06:41PMThursday, April 4, 2019
American theater blows off a lot of folx. Leaves out their voices. Doesn’t cast them. Isn’t interested in their stories. Two-Spirit indigenous transpeople, for conspicuous instance, are …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:58PMWednesday, April 3, 2019
When one has an overwhelming experience in the theater—as I did watching Native Son at Mosaic—it can take some time to process. This is especially so if the work is unlike anything one t…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:13PMMonday, April 1, 2019
There’s a lot that’s shocking and disturbing in this show, as well there should be—it’s based on the April 20, 1999, shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. That ma…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 06:07PMSaturday, March 23, 2019
There is indeed a dog in this play, aptly named Dog, wryly performed by Karen Lange wearing a plaid shirt, jeans, and neck bandana. At the top of Act One, Dog sings a country-westernish song…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:35PMFriday, March 22, 2019
We are seated on folding chairs in the living room of an actual house where two women and a man in their mid-twenties have agreed to meet up for a three-way. There’s a modest playing area …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:13PMMonday, March 18, 2019
Queen of Basel by Hilary Bettis, now on the boards at Studio, is scathingly brilliant. One walks out gobsmacked. (I completely concur with my colleague Bob Ashby’s astute review.) But watc…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:45PMSaturday, March 16, 2019
Hexagon has been around for 64 years and never seems to age. Since 1956 the musical comedy theater group has been turning out original political satire that’s as of-the-moment as the news.…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:54PMFriday, March 15, 2019
The circus I fell in love with as a kid is gone. It was touted at the time as the greatest show on earth: a three-ring tented extravaganza that smelled of roasted peanuts, sawdust, and manur…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:03PMWednesday, March 13, 2019
The title of this show, if you have never heard of it, doesn’t mean what you might think. It’s not about fitness. It’s not about sex. It’s a country-western musical about ten hard-up…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:08PMTuesday, March 12, 2019
We like to think that the Holocaust could never happen here. We want to believe that it shouldn’t so it couldn’t. And then comes along a work of theater like Crying Hands that screams ou…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:16PMFriday, March 8, 2019
When we see an unwell homeless person on the street—these days huddled in layers of rags against the cold—we can know nothing of the story of who they are and how they got there. All we …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:28AMSunday, March 3, 2019
Raymond O. Caldwell kicks off his new Producing Artistic Directorship at Theater Alliance with a production of Dominque Morisseau’s Blood at the Root that is bursting with youthful exubera…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:43PMMonday, February 25, 2019
“Will I be missed?,” the young man wonders aloud as he surveys the thirtysomethings who have gathered in his Manhattan apartment for a party after his funeral. “Did it matter that I wa…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:47AMWednesday, February 13, 2019
The Reykjavík conjured up in Steve Yockey’s new play Reykjavík is not the family-friendly destination the Iceland tourist bureau might try to sell you. But if you’re 18 or olde…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:24AMSaturday, February 9, 2019
BLKS is gonna be a blockbuster. Let’s get that out of the way. BLKS is a rapid-fire, laugh-out-loud comedy about a quartet of twenty-something black women in New York City who are room…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:01PMFriday, February 8, 2019
“You have to be a good Arab,” says Morad Hassan of the stigma he faces trying to have a career as an Arab actor in Israel—the very country where, he says, “we are the Jew…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:53PMTuesday, February 5, 2019
“You fucked up! You fucked up! You fucked up!” rails the older brother, berating the younger. “You fucked up! You fucked up! You fucked up!” he goes on, as if he cann…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:09AMThursday, January 31, 2019
Cross-racial casting can be totally wrongheaded—as when white actors impersonate characters of color. It can also be speciously universalizing—as when actors of color play all the parts …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:31PMWednesday, January 30, 2019
When the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” comes on the pre-show soundtrack, it’s a tipoff that C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters is going to be a diabol…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:01PMThursday, January 24, 2019
“Some of my best friends are white men,” says Sherri, the very liberal white woman who handles admissions at a small New England prep school. Avowedly antiracist, Sherri is on a …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:23AMTuesday, January 22, 2019
If there’s such a thing as gay wit, Paul Rudnick’s got a load of it. Imagine Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward if they could be out about it. Yeah, Rudnick ranks with them and then so…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:27AMSunday, January 13, 2019
It was “a century of struggle” before women in the United States won the right to vote in 1920, and the centenary of the amendment that cinched it, the nineteenth, is just around…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:52PMSunday, December 23, 2018
DC’s two major federally funded theater venues have both announced that performances will be uninterrupted by the federal shutdown. According to the website of Ford’s Theatre, …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:11PMFriday, December 21, 2018
When I was a kid, magic tricks and puppet shows were forerunners to my love of theater. They were like my gateway drug. I got hooked on the wonder and live storytelling. And to this day I as…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:05PMThursday, December 20, 2018
“Laws are like sausages,” goes the adage. “It’s better not to see them being made.” As it happens, I have a good mental picture of how sausages are made, because fo…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:21PM 
