Tuesday, February 17, 2015
I know what you’re thinking: is Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya just like Life Sucks, except with a bunch of Russian guys? Let me turn the question around for you: do you think that Uncle Va…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:57AMMonday, February 16, 2015
That the pen is mightier than the sword is the dream of every English major, and also the theme of the Zachary Fernebok’s “Pirate Laureate” series, of which this is the second exemplar…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:41AMWednesday, February 11, 2015
Quick quiz: who would you most like to give you their cat for safekeeping after first making you pledge your life to its well-being: (a) Tony Soprano (b) Satan or (c) the Irish rebel Padraic…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:25AMMonday, February 9, 2015
In the final five minutes of her life, a nameless hot corn girl (Tia Shearer) shivers in the cold winds off the Atlantic, argues with her pimp, Eddie Farrell (Michael Kevin Darnall), and wor…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:18AMTuesday, February 3, 2015
Folger’s gorgeous, sumptuous Mary Stuart is a bodice-ripper for the brainy, distilling a life-and-death moment to its constituent elements of pride, resentment, entitlement and loss. It is…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:23AMMonday, January 12, 2015
America is engaged in an agonizing public discussion of the roles, and prerogatives, of our police force in light of recent deaths in Ferguson, Missouri and New York City. Does American Cent…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:02PMMonday, December 29, 2014
The Great Divorce is a story about the bus ride from Hell – literally: the Redemption Express from the bad section (there is no good section) of “the gray town” to the verdant fields o…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:18AMSunday, December 21, 2014
In an electrifying conclusion to Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism, with a Key to the Scriptures, members of the cast read a letter from Kushn…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:23AMTuesday, December 2, 2014
Someone has stormed the Capitol, looted the Treasury, eviscerated the Judiciary, and declared sex illegal. No, no, not Ted Cruz. This happened thousands of years ago, and the culprit was Lys…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:25PMTuesday, November 25, 2014
Has this ever happened to you? It is 1963. You’re Charlie “the Duck” Clench, career criminal, and you’re played by Steve Beall. You’ve pledged the hand of your daughter, Pauline (M…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:52AMIf you would know a cat, you must first watch him dance, and then hear him sing, and after that you will understand his story. So it is with the cats in Cats, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s adaptat…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:26AMTuesday, November 11, 2014
On December 6, 1917 an explosion tore through Halifax, Nova Scotia, obliterating the Richmond District and shattering virtually every window in the City. The ensuing tsunami wiped out the Mi…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:15PMMonday, November 10, 2014
You know this place, although you may have never been here. There is a picture of Jack Kennedy, looking a little mischievous, on one wall. On another, the benevolent smile of His Holiness th…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:59AMMonday, November 3, 2014
Helen Bayer (Emily Townley) has multiple sclerosis. And ten minutes into this odd, funny, sad play – God forgive me – I was ready to throw her and her wheelchair down a flight of stairs.…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:48AMMonday, October 20, 2014
“There’s nothing wrong,” Elmer Gantry (Charlie Pollock) tells a musician (Nick Lehan) in the latest version of this oft-sung tale, “with a few hot licks on behalf of Jesus Christ.”…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:27PMThursday, October 16, 2014
“When you wear the mask for so long,” Lincoln Perry, a/k/a Stepin Fetchit (Roscoe Orman) warns Sonji Clay (Katherine Renee Turner), the wife of world heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, f…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:50AMMonday, October 13, 2014
To understand The Taming of the Shrew as Shakespeare intended, you must imagine it to be in a land – such as Shakespeare’s England – where the observance of gender roles was a matter o…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:47AMMonday, September 29, 2014
In the William Kennedy novel Ironweed, Francis Phelen drops his infant son while changing his diaper. The boy’s neck snaps and he dies. Toward the conclusion of the first chapter, this pas…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 05:00AMTuesday, September 23, 2014
Barbara Bear, who regularly attends more than one hundred theatrical productions a year in the DC Area, has won the 2014 Gary Lee Maker Audience Award. Bear received her award last night at …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:30AMMonday, September 22, 2014
You are a Capulet or you are a Montague, and so when you enter the DC Reynolds Bar you get a red cup or a blue cup. Thereafter, in a prelude to the saddest romantic tragedy in all of English…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 05:43AMFriday, September 19, 2014
We love to see the Devil on stage because – let’s be honest – he’s the character who is most like us. When he shows up in our stories, it is always with a wounded sense of entitlemen…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:30AMForum Theatre, the Silver Spring-based company which brought such plays as The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, Angels in America and Gidion’s Knot, among others, to DC over the last five year…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:01AMWednesday, September 17, 2014
On Thursday, September 18, at 7 PM, and Wednesday, September 24 at 2PM, Angelika Pop-Up at Union Market, 550 Penn Street NE, will present the filmed version of the Globe Theatre’s acclaime…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:19AMWednesday, September 10, 2014
The Globe Theatre, launching its tour of America with a stint at the Folger, has created a King Lear for our times. I have seen noble Lears, pathological Lears, fragile Lears, arrogant Lears…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:04AMIn her acclaimed plays 4000 Miles and After the Revolution Amy Herzog’s characters face moral dilemmas, particularly concerning the conflict between loyalty to the state and loyalty to fam…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:26AMTuesday, August 19, 2014
It is 2004. As the lights dim in the auditorium, a tall, powerfully-built man of late middle years slips unobtrusively into a seat in a back row. He is a critic. The week previous, he had re…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:27AMTuesday, August 12, 2014
Edgar Allan Poe’s tale has grown so large in the literary imagination that we forget that the original was a short story, less than 7200 words in length and more atmosphere than incident. …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:45AMKathleen Akerley’s Something Past in Front of the Light remains, in my view, the finest original work by a Washington-area playwright not named Posner. She has written other excellent play…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:01AMSaturday, August 9, 2014
There was a time, in the nineteen sixties, where it seemed we had come to the end of the world. The muscular optimism of the Kennedy years had closed, literally, with a bang. Hemmingway, who…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 04:08PMTuesday, July 29, 2014
Alexandra Petri, who writes a humor column for the Washington Post, has here written a sex comedy. By this I mean she has written a play in which people say witty things while, um, having se…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:17AMWednesday, July 23, 2014
On days when I’m seeing a Fringe show, I generally put my button on when I get dressed in the morning and leave it on all day. It’s more convenient that way. Yesterday I was riding the M…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:58AM 
