Sunday, September 20, 2020
I first learned of Dr. Linsey Marr when I read a startling opinion piece that appeared in the New York Times July 30: As “a civil and environmental engineer who studies how viruses and bac…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:11PMSunday, September 6, 2020
During the past seven-odd years that I’ve contributed to DC Metro Theater Arts, I’ve written about upwards of 600 shows—sometimes as the designated reviewer (when I followed criticism …
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:53AMFriday, June 12, 2020
Interview by Roberta Alves Spooky Action Theater’s livestreamed New Works in Action play-reading series continues Sunday, May 14, at 3 pm with Circular by Laura Shamas. Her heritage incl…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:25PMWednesday, June 10, 2020
The cultural momentum powering protests that followed the May 25 murder of George Floyd has galvanized a national and local movement for transformational change in American theater led by Bl…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:15PMTuesday, March 10, 2020
In 1955 James Baldwin had just turned 30 and had written a play about a storefront church in Harlem that he could not get produced in New York. There was “no market” for it, he was told.…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:47PMMonday, March 9, 2020
There is a drama on stage right now at Studio Theatre—Pass Over by Antoinette Nwandu—so harrowing it will stop your heart. In it, Christopher Lovell and Jalen Gilbert give two of the mos…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:53PMSunday, March 8, 2020
The history of science is studded with female geniuses snubbed by sexism. There’s biophysicist Rosalind Franklin, geneticist Nettie Stevens, chemist Alice Ball— And several such brillian…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:08PMWednesday, March 4, 2020
Dani Stoller’s world-premiere comedy Easy Women Smoking Loose Cigarettes is funny and witty and in its own quirky way quite deep. Plus it puts the screw in screwball. Discovered in the Sig…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:32PMMonday, March 2, 2020
Boys Don’t Cry made this boy cry. It happened near the end. I had been watching a performance by the French dance company Cie Hervé Koubi. Seven shirtless male dancers, all from different…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:18PMSunday, March 1, 2020
A poetic and politically charged same-gender-loving love story, This Bitter Earth by Harrison David Rivers—now playing in a powerfully moving production at Theater Alliance—strips bare t…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:56AMSunday, February 23, 2020
Anne Washburn’s Shipwreck: A History Play About 2017 is an epic, scorching, and surreal satire of white liberalism in the era of Trump. It takes place at that ominous juncture in recent Am…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:00PMSaturday, February 15, 2020
“Oh, god. Maybe it didn’t work,” the mother exclaims in alarm. It’s the moment in this hold-your-breath drama when she realizes the gender experiment done on her child, one of two id…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 06:45PMFriday, February 14, 2020
“I’m good at finding out the truth,” says Billy Argo (Spencer Coben), the boy-prodigy detective, near the beginning of this clever, quirky, and quite touching musical. So observant of …
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:12PMThursday, February 13, 2020
Post-Play Palaver is an occasional series of conversations between DC Metro Theater Arts writers who saw the same performance, got really into talking about it, and decided to continue their…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:55AMSaturday, February 8, 2020
It may surprise you (as it did me) that the title of this melodic world-premiere musical does not refer to gunpowder. The word gun means there’s a pistol (which gets dramatically deployed)…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:13PMFriday, February 7, 2020
At the start of this brave performance, we see on a dark stage a young man who is making a suicide attempt. He is wearing cargo pants, a tee, and sneaks and has a food-storage bag over his h…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:05PMTuesday, February 4, 2020
This play about a boxer packs so many emotional punches into its compact six rounds, you might not know what hit you. As fists fly, bells clang, terse words burst, and the cast claps out eac…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:30PMMonday, February 3, 2020
Dominion Stage has given this rowdy, irreverent, and rollicking rock musical a remarkably woke production that is as rousing as it is reflective and as satiric as it is unsettling. Set in 18…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:01AMSunday, January 26, 2020
Summoning a galaxy of African American recording stars, this poignant one-act sometimes seems like a sublime dream with vintage music. There are ethereal visions, vivid Afrofuturist visitati…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:40PMTuesday, January 21, 2020
This thoroughly delightful offering from Mosaic has all the makings of a lighthearted rom-com. Boy meets girl. He invites her to his place. She initiates sex. It’s hot. Though they come fr…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:54PMMonday, January 20, 2020
The set for Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline at Studio Theatre could not be any whiter. Its white walls of freshly painted concrete blocks span the breadth of the stage and extend around the…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:03PMSunday, January 19, 2020
The casual cruelty that constructs men’s certainty they’re real men—and the cost of that violence to others and to themselves—comes under scathing scrutiny in Joe Calarco’s shatter…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:35AMWednesday, January 15, 2020
A gathering stormcloud looms over this exquisitely wrought play by Alix Sobler. “How bad is it going to get?” a character wonders aloud. No one can answer. “It can’t go on like this …
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:53AMWednesday, December 18, 2019
Now in its eighth year, Step Afrika!’s Magical Musical Holiday Step Show has established itself as the season’s most joyful and lovable family festivity in DC. Exuberant music, adorable …
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:02PMTuesday, December 17, 2019
“Have you seen this before?” I heard an audience member ask his friend just before Holiday Sauce, Taylor Mac’s sold-out alt-holiday extravaganza at The Kennedy Center. “Prepare your…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:38PMMonday, December 16, 2019
When Playwright Lauren Gunderson took on the challenge of adapting J. M. Barrie’s 1904 Peter Pan, she knew she had to fix what she has called the “deeply harmful misrepresentation of Ind…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:53PMSunday, December 15, 2019
The five adults seated onstage in a children’s classroom each have a kid enrolled in this private day school, which like the play we’re watching is named Eureka Day. These earnest pare…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:22PMTuesday, December 10, 2019
J. M. Barrie imagined a lot when he wrote his 1904 play about the boy who wouldn’t grow up, but he could not have imagined how many childhoods have been etched by its enchantment. Now in P…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:17PMSunday, December 1, 2019
My name is Christopher Boone and I am 15 and I am brave and I can do anything. I know that because I traveled by train by myself from Swindon to London and I solved the mystery of a neighbor…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:58PMFriday, November 29, 2019
On the day I was to see 19: The Musical—which is about how the amendment granting women the right to vote came to pass in 1920—our Constitution Denier in Chief made a perfectly timed gaf…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:28PMTuesday, November 19, 2019
Anchuli Felicia King’s White Pearl is a hilarious, fast-paced satire set in the Singapore office of a cosmetics startup called Clearday that sells skin-whitening cream to Asian women. As t…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:43PM 
