Friday, August 9, 2019
In the Devine black box theater at Georgetown University’s Davis Performing Arts Center, nine casually dressed undergraduate students, seated in chairs or on the floor take turns telling t…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:58PMMonday, April 8, 2019
A klaxon sounds. A video montage of “Betsy” LaQuanda Ross (actor and playwright Liza Jessie Peterson) passing through the visitor entrance at a correctional facility plays in black and w…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:58PMMonday, March 11, 2019
Taking their seats in the black box theater, the audience is confronted with three immobile figures cloaked in chiaroscuro, as small, gold-leafed picture frames faintly reflect tiny boxes of…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:02PMSaturday, January 26, 2019
A young Vladimir Putin (Christopher Geary) steps onto the stage, wearing a 1980s tracksuit, quoting a passage from the Soviet absurdist and surrealist writer Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) “How…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:18PMThursday, December 13, 2018
As Talley’s Folly opens, 40-something-year-old, self-described “hairy Jewish accountant” Matt Friedman (John Taylor Phillips) steps onto the stage and informs the audience that he …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:44PMTuesday, November 13, 2018
From the moment the audience enters the large square room that is Spooky Action Theater’s church basement home, Environmental Designer Colin K. Bills has already communicated to the au…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:11PMMonday, November 12, 2018
Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s Our Class opens in 1926 in a kindergarten classroom in a small town in northeastern Poland. Whereas in most of Europe’s Jews had experienced a long history…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:32AMSunday, November 4, 2018
Nobel laureate Dario Fo’s Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay! (one of several English language renderings of the original title, Non Si Paga! Non Si Paga!) opens as Antonia (Francesca Ma…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:37PMThursday, November 1, 2018
King John is so rarely performed (indeed, it’s been a decade since I last saw it staged) that the current Aaron Posner-directed production at the Folger Theatre opens with a primer on …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:30AMSaturday, October 27, 2018
Entering the black box theater space at the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, it is clear that We Happy Few’s A Midnight Dreary is not a normal theatrical adaptation of classic literature. A…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:00PMMonday, October 8, 2018
Seasonally-themed evenings of short plays are a staple for smaller theater companies – and with Halloween just weeks away, The Coil Project offers up a quartet of violent and supernatural …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:17PMWednesday, October 3, 2018
The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare’s earliest and most popular works, so there is little point recounting the plot. One must only remember that it is the one with two sets of t…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:17PMSunday, September 16, 2018
Storytelling is one of the most ancient of the performing arts, distinct from that of the dramatic actor, and when Mona Golabek makes her entrance, it is not as an actor playing a character …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:01PMMonday, September 10, 2018
Director Kip Fagan opens this production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Gloria with a clever conceit: Miles (Justin Weaks), an office intern, is at his desk, as the contrapuntal woodwinds …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:13PMThursday, July 26, 2018
The melody may be unfamiliar, but the music that opens The 100th Monkey Theatre Ensemble’s 52:15 is immediately recognizable as a television news show open. A reporter, speaking to the…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:59AMTuesday, July 24, 2018
An unnamed academic (Cristen Stephansky), in town for a conference, lounges on a sofa taking notes for her presentation. Her host, (Karoline Troger) a similarly unnamed Austrian scholar now …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:21PMSaturday, July 21, 2018
An ancient professor (Mickey Hays) ambles into the lecture hall, his collapsed posture and bowlegged, turned-out stance recalling Pantalone of the commedia dell’arte (he even wears the…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:07PMORT Productions’ Beauty and the Beat begins with a trio of dancers (Kelly Hogan, Carrie Monger, and Amy Scaringe) entering in formation into the graffitied performance space of the Bli…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:21PMMonday, July 16, 2018
As the audience enters to see Roko’s Basilisk produced by Reliant Theatre, they are handed not a playbill, but a flyer, whose relevance is not immediately apparent. Its text simply st…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:43AMSunday, July 8, 2018
Theatre Du Jour’s The Accidental Pilgrim is an ensemble-devised work, directed by company co-founder B. Stanley. The ensemble’s style is heavily indebted to such twentieth-centur…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:20PMWednesday, June 6, 2018
New York, 1991: Zalmy (Tyler Herman) and Shmuly (Josh Adams) are two young men, best friends since childhood, excited to get behind the wheel of their newly acquired RV. What makes them diff…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:08PMMonday, June 4, 2018
The setting (designed by Daniel Prosky) is not a battlefield in Anatolia in modern day Turkey, but what appears to be the office of an academic – perhaps a classicist. There is no computer…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:34PMSunday, May 20, 2018
Though it has commonly been staged as a tragedy or psychological drama since its Moscow premiere, Anton Chekhov always insisted that The Cherry Orchard was a comedy. A story about an aristoc…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:23PMSunday, April 15, 2018
Sherry (Lady Davonne), a WMATA train driver, starts her day at Shady Grove in Derwood, MD. She has a word with the lead car of her train, “Forty-Twenty”: a soon to be decommissioned vehi…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:31PMMonday, April 9, 2018
Though he had a wide stylistic range, in America, Federico García Lorca’s fame as a playwright is mostly limited to his rural tragedy, Blood Wedding (Bodas de Sangre) which was origin…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:25PMThe phrase “film noir” evokes both a particular sub-genre of the crime film as well as a particular era. Inspired by the moody expressionist dramas of the silent era that had come to an …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:51PMMonday, March 5, 2018
Schimmelpfennig's Winter Solstice is an important play by a major playwright.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 06:01PMFriday, February 23, 2018
Steven Barkhimer's mastery of the role's physicality is the key to his expression of its villainy.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 01:56PMWednesday, December 6, 2017
Dario Fo's dark comedy still deserves its reputation as a classic.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 11:36PMMonday, November 27, 2017
Scripts like The Hearing also provide an optic through which to examine our own nation's problems.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 03:24PMSunday, November 12, 2017
Director Courtney O'Connor, the Nora Theatre, and its skilled cast do right by this hilarious historical comedy.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 02:24PM 
