Review: Mosaic Theater Company's World Premiere of Nancy
Nancy is a compelling satirical play with themes which still resonate today as Indigenous communities in the U.S. (and around the world) fight to get their land back, advocate for environmental justice, and improve the lives of people within their communities.
Review: THIS MUCH I KNOW at Theater J
What an odd thing the human mind is! –for it can make false assumptions, construct facile rationalizations, and rely on preconceived notions---as the audience soon finds out through the alternately clever, character-driven, and coiling convolutions of Theater J’s east coast premiere of the play This Much I Know. This is a play that asks questions more than it supplies answers and in that the audience can find sufficient satisfaction.
SPAMALOT, SWEPT AWAY And More Nominated for 2024 Helen Hayes Awards
Tonight, at a celebration honoring outstanding theatre on stages across the Washington area, theatre artists, administrators, patrons, and special guests gathered at the ATLAS Performing Arts Center for Theatre Washington's announcement of nominees for the 40th Helen Hayes Awards.
Review: MY MAMA AND THE FULL SCALE INVASION at Woolly Mammoth Theatre
What did our critic think of MY MAMA AND THE FULL SCALE INVASION at Woolly Mammoth Theatre? How do you tell the story of a person who has lived 1,000 lives? How do you capture a life that includes being born into Nazi occupation, raising a child, surviving a massive nuclear accident, and a full-scale invasion of a homeland…all in a tight, 90-minute package?
Review: GOOD BONES at Studio Theatre
A solid, well-crafted, and thought-provoking play---Good Bones is about four individuals coping in various ways with issues of onrushing gentrification, loss of community, and reconnection. Playwright James Ijames has written an all too relevant story about what happens when a community and sense of place fragments, shifts and splinters off into new paradigms. Now being presented at the Studio Theatre in the intimate Milton Theater space, this absorbing play uncoiled with the mix of familiarity, drama and humor that is the stuff of everyday life –but, also, was replete with the many small, insightful details of writing that show a very perceptive playwright at work.
Tightened and Thrilling HAMLET at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company
I think the minimalism and starkness is intended to be clarifying; we are meant to be focused on the hearts of the various intertwined stories Shakespeare presents, and perhaps less distracted by other things going on at the very large periphery the playwright has laid out. Whatever the purpose, we find ourselves deeply drawn in, so that by the time all the bodies bestrew the stage at the end, the horror and the catharsis of it all has not only engulfed us – but thrilled us as well.