Six audience members isn’t an empty house; that’s the full load for Nichole Canuso Dance Company’s THE GARDEN. The basement below us is an expansive concrete stretch, a network of small rooms and squared pillars, and we’re sent down into a smallish room scattered with chairs. We’re invited to sit wherever we like.
View More THE GARDEN (Nichole Canuso Dance Company): Offer your hand…
Director Ginger Dayle and sound and video designer Ren Manley intersperse audio and visuals from the 1960s in New City Stage Company’s RFK, complementing Widdall’s powerful performance with a great soundtrack and contextualizing video clips. Following pre-show newsreels from JFK’s assassination, the play begins in 1964—eight months after the fateful day in Dallas.
View More RFK (New City Stage): An American tragedy
The immaculate Martha’s Vineyard home of the African American LeVay family is the set for Lydia R. Diamond’s STICK FLY at Arden Theatre Company. Plush sofas and pristine white cabinetry are the trappings around which the evening’s drama unfolds. The audience has a window into the kitchen, living room and porch where at times multiples scenes take place at complementary intervals; sometimes echoing their counterparts in the next room. The characters in the play are a complex set, all with different but overlapping backgrounds—some more than they realize.
View More STICK FLY (Arden): An inventive, relentlessly funny look at race and class
SmokeyScout is named after artistic director Josh McIlvain’s cats: Smokey and Scout. The program of the November NICE AND FRESH thanks them, along with Moving Arts of…
View More NICE AND FRESH November (SmokeyScout): Get punched in the face by art at SmokeyScout Productions’ NICE AND FRESH
Since my original review of New City Stage Company’s stellar production of RFK in October 2012 (reprinted below), the show was featured in Washington, DC’s…
View More Revisiting New City Stage Company’s RFK
The three troupe members of the FringeArts-famous Berserker Residents will do pretty much anything to get a good laugh out of the audience. Their recently…
View More THE JERSEY DEVIL (Berserker Residents): 60-second review
SHE STOOPS is an 18th-century comedy of manners and mistaken identities by Oliver Goldsmith. It is considered by many to be the most enduring of…
View More SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER (Quintessence): A contemporary 18th-century comedy
Here’s the setup: A young man has lived with his male lover for a few years. During a spat he falls for a woman. Things…
View More COCK (Theatre Exile): Spatial choreography reveals isolation, influence, and alliances.
Is life sweet when you live in the Louisiana Bayou before an unprecedented storm hits? For Marcus (Eric L. Fleming), life at 16 years of age…
View More MARCUS; OR THE SECRET OF SWEET (Plays & Players): 60-second review
Finding love and self-knowledge beyond the fixed categories of sexual identity (gay, straight, or bi) is the central theme of Michael Bartlett’s COCK, now in…
View More COCK (Theatre Exile): A Provocative Fight for Love and Identity
Drury’s funny, traumatic, inventive and timely play will stab at you, personally, at least once. She asks whether it is important that a story be told, or if it is more important that it be told in a certain way. She uses the events in Namibia to illustrate the cracks in our own culture, the divides caused by racial issues even among a group of people who would probably all vote for the same candidate..
View More WE ARE PROUD TO PRESENT (InterAct): Are You Black Enough?
Director Dan Hodge does not mind imposing his vision upon a text. His bold decision to combine the Ariel and Miranda characters proved surprisingly effective.in…
View More MACBETH (Hedgrow): An ambitious and effective take on the Scottish play
Luna Theater Company’s interpretation of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel is a unique marriage of the British author’s futuristic stylizations with disturbing a cappella songs with the historic conventions of masking and stock movement inspired by Italian commedia dell’arte. It’s a perfect match to tell the cutting-edge morality tale of teen ultra-violence and reform.
View More A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (Luna): Commedia dell’arte meets post-modern morality play
A tongue-in-cheek recounting of some of the sexier moments of King Arthur’s rule, COURTLY LUST attempts to do it all—just like the knights of old.…
View More COURTLY LUST: A KING ARTHUR BURLESQUE (GDP/Walking Fish): 60-second review
In response to a story I wrote about LSD, a college creative writing professor told me that it’s never a good idea to give characters…
View More HANNAH (Hella Fresh): The glories of the sober mind
SLASHER is a one hour improv play in the vein of a B-movie horror. There’s an unnecessarily precautious “splash area” where the audience may be stained with stray stage blood. An audience member’s spin of a wheel dictates the setting and holiday (a school on Easter weekend, on opening night). If this sounds like a description of the kind of show you like to see, you’ll probably like SLASHER.
View More SLASHER (Figment): An improv horror
Colonialism is Pygmalian writ large: one culture trying to civilize another. In Danai Gurira’s melodramatic THE CONVERT, a priggish preacher (Irungu Mutu) in 1895 Rhodesia (present-day…
View More THE CONVERT (Wilma/Woolly Mammoth): Shining a light on colonialism
As someone born in the mid-1980s, I’ve rolled my eyes at the sight of the word “Millennial” more times than I can count. What’s great about Amy Herzog’s 4000 MILES is that she refuses to imprison the characters in any social or political context.
View More 4000 MILES (PTC): What a Long, Strange Trip it’s Been
Hip, fast-paced, with a frat-boy-cool lead: these aren’t usually phrases to describe HAMLET. But Quintessence Theatre Group’s heavily edited version takes a bare bodkin to Shakespeare’s story of revenge and existential crisis in the state of Denmark.
View More HAMLET (Quintessence): Brevity is the soul of it
The world’s most famous love story is given a new twist. The familiar characters are now the teenaged daughters of the feuding Montague and Capulet families, whose tragic romance is used to explore the true universality of Shakespeare’s themes.
View More ROMEO AND JULIET (Curio): A same-sex take on Shakespeare’s classic