Thursday, October 17, 2019
To realize how much white America loved minstrelsy is a reckoning painful or shameful, depending on one’s ancestry. Minstrel shows were never meant for people of African descent to see; th…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:51AMTuesday, October 15, 2019
Editor’s note: Woolly Mammoth Theatre, in conjunction with its staging of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview, has brought to DC a show produced by the Harlem-based Movement Theatre Company…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:24PMSunday, October 13, 2019
How does that new GalaPro app work? How well does it work? And what’s it like to watch a show with it? This inquiring theatergoer wanted to know. Many Deaf and hard of hearing people are a…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:12AMMonday, October 7, 2019
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Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:41PMSaturday, October 5, 2019
Midway through this taut, fraught drama about sexual trauma, a woman named Ana, a wife and young mother, is suddenly triggered. We are not told exactly why. It might be the Kavanaugh hearing…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:09PMMonday, September 30, 2019
Can one laugh heartily at a satirical comedy—be thoroughly engaged by the entertaining characters, story, and performances—and then after it’s over mourn what it was about? That was …
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:21PMTuesday, September 24, 2019
Sitting in the front row in a child-size chair, I watched a puppet show based improbably on a play by Tennessee Williams. The occasion was a preview at Spooky Action Theater of a never-befor…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:52PMSunday, September 22, 2019
Whether you’re an avid reader or a theater buff or both, there’s a supersmart, superfunny show up in Silver Spring that should be on your short list. Marking its 52nd anniversary (!), co…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:50PMThursday, September 19, 2019
I saw Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview opening night at Woolly, and I cannot stop thinking about its originality—not only in form but in intent. I’m not writing about the production—…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:52AMMonday, September 16, 2019
When Heidi Shreck steps out onto the Eisenhower stage and has what seems an informal, ad-libbed, introductory chat with us, the first thing you notice is her joy. She seems genuinely happy t…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:35AMSunday, September 15, 2019
It isn’t every day you see a play that merges Becket and Martha Graham. That’s my takeaway from watching the hybrid form of Surfacing play out at the Atlas: Three actors are strictly cir…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:03AMThursday, September 12, 2019
“How does a black boy become an American?” asks spoken word artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph. “How does he learn his role to play?” For Joseph the question is personal and visceral. In The…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:29AMWednesday, September 11, 2019
The bar is open and there’s 100-proof theater on tap. It’s a stirring play about an Irish immigrant bartender, and it’s shaking up a classy new cocktail bar where only 30 patrons at a …
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:53PMTuesday, August 27, 2019
It takes a certain talent to turn topics that are no laughing matter into laugh-out-loud comedy that doesn’t condescend, doesn’t ridicule, and yet imbues life with meaning as only art ca…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:18PMTuesday, August 13, 2019
Back in 1998, the official Enron vision and values statement had a line in it that said: “Ruthlessness, callousness, and arrogance don’t belong here.” Two years later, as the company…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:47PMMonday, August 12, 2019
The animus being whipped up against “invaders” at our southern border lends Naomi Wallace’s 1993 The War Boys an unsettling resonance. Written when she was but 26, the play is about th…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:23AMFriday, August 9, 2019
“There are holes in the script!” would be the deathblow for any more conventional work of theater, but in Nassim Solimanpour’s Blank, the gaps are where the action’s at. As with Soli…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:44AMSunday, August 4, 2019
Liz Duffy Adams’s play Or,—which premiered in 2009 at the Women’s Project in New York—is a deliciously literate feminist farce. A radical mashup of dichotomies (among them straight a…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:09PMFriday, August 2, 2019
When Dear Evan Hansen debuted at Arena Stage four years ago, I was so moved by the show I wrote it a love letter, republished below. Now a Broadway hit, it returns to DC for a run at Kennedy…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:36PMSaturday, July 27, 2019
It always sparks joy when Cirque du Soleil comes to town, and its latest Big Top production, Volta, is a crazy-wondrous delight. The show is inspired by amateur street sports, and its theme …
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:36PMTuesday, July 23, 2019
Over a period of 16 days in Washington, DC, in July 2019, Mike Daisey gave 18 different performances, each about an hour and 45 minutes long, of his epic look at America’s past, present, a…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:16PMTuesday, July 9, 2019
John: Before you brought A People’s History to DC, you performed all 18 parts three times—once through in Minneapolis and twice through in Seattle. I can imagine people could be picking …
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:54PMSaturday, July 6, 2019
Chapter 1: The Gold Earring, July 5 8pm Mike Daisey’s marathon retort to Trump’s Fourth of July “Salute to America” kicked off in the Kogod Chapel last night before a sold-out crowd.…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:31AMThursday, July 4, 2019
Midway through this fast, furious, in-your-face poetic explosive about anti-black racism, one of the three cast members stops the action and says: “I’m sorry, I’m trying to keep up the…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:38AMTuesday, July 2, 2019
Flashing a wide smile and a V sign, outfitted in power suit, sensible pumps, and her trademark glasses and bouffant, Shirley Chisholm enters the Anacostia Playhouse blackbox waving to the ap…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:04PMSunday, June 30, 2019
This power plant of a play knocked me out two years ago during the Capital Fringe Festival and knocked me out all over again in the DC Black Theatre & Arts Festival. The Heroes’ Tale d…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:21PMSaturday, June 29, 2019
One looks for hope where one can find it. And sometimes hope pops up on its own, unexpected. That kind of hope, not sought out, can catch in one’s throat, can even move one to tears. Such …
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:02AMWednesday, June 26, 2019
Twisted Melodies is a spectacular finish to Mosaic’s fourth season. Written by and starring Kelvin Roston, Jr., the show sweeps us into Donny Hathaway’s world of magnificent music-making…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:26PMTuesday, June 25, 2019
With the recent release of I Am Not Your Negro and If Beale Street Could Talk, the eminent writer James Baldwin received significant cinematic attention. This has been followed in DC by t…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:45AMSunday, June 23, 2019
I remember being so bored by my high school American history class that I got a D in it. This was not normal. My report cards always had A’s and B’s. So the kindly elderly woman who taug…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:56PMTuesday, June 18, 2019
I have to marvel at all the ways the national culture temple named for our 35th president reaches out to an audience that looks like America. There’s no such uniform audience, of course—…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:18PM 
