Splinters

We have nothing in our lives as valuable or as vulnerable as our children, and for many parents their children’s youth is a nightmare of fragility. Their kids are at any moment potential prey to disease, to accident, to their own bad choices and, increasingly in our sad age, to slimy predators whose very existence is an insult to their Creator. [Read more...]

Johnny Meister and The Stitch

Pulsing with snarling, furious energy, Solas Nua’s headlong production of Rosemary Jenkinson’s streetwise play Johnny Meister and The Stitch is not for the faint of heart. A nifty and perhaps intentional prelude to DC’s upcoming Capital Fringe fest—it weighed in at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe –this down and dirty two-man drama whisks you away, uninvited, to the dangerous, impoverished back streets of Belfast, Northern Ireland where two angry young men square off for a final, inevitable smackdown. [Read more...]

The Pull of Negative Gravity

What is worse – the worry of having a loved one in a distant war or the pain of dealing with his return, crippled both physically and emotionally?  Both situations are experienced by the characters in The Pull of Negative Gravity, a dark but gutsy choice as the inaugural production of the Welders Theatre Company.  It is a powerful and haunting work, one that this reviewer won’t soon forget. [Read more...]

Masterworks Broadway series

A group of people exists who love show music like I love show music – and the theatre gods have finally given them the wherewithal to share their love. They work at Masterworks Broadway and they are in the process of filling in blanks in the collections of us fanatics. [Read more...]

Writing and performing Bucky’s song and dance

A conversation with playwright/director D. W. Jacobs and performer Rick Foucheux

If you haven’t read the work of Buckminster Fuller or seen it explained in R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe, you might doubt whether watching one solo performance could totally transform how you see this “Spaceship Earth”  [Read more...]

David Ives on Spinoza and New Jerusalem

“I’D RATHER SLING HASH THAN WRITE THE SAME KIND OF PLAY TWICE”

All right. So you saw Constellation do David Ives’ witty adaptation of George Feydeau’s farce A Flea in Her Ear last October. And in April, you went to the Shakespeare to see how Ives reinvented the 1643 Pierre Corneille’s comedy The Liar. And now you’ve noticed that Theater J will be staging Ives’ The New Jerusalem, [Read more...]

This Is Not a Time Bomb

It’s uncanny when an actor comes on stage and tells you exactly what will happen when you leave the theater that evening. Then again, lots of things about This is Not A Time Bomb are unsettling.

It begins when Edward Daniels tells us we will probably leave the theater and have a conversation, but what will take place is simply a story. [Read more...]

Hamlet

You park your car in the Courthouse parking lot, and board a shuttle toward the top of the hill, where the remains of the Patapsco Female Institute rest. You buy your ticket and pick up your seat cushion, and sidle upward in a counterclockwise circle (the least steep traveling route), [Read more...]

Completely Hollywood (abridged)

It seems almost redundant to satirize the movie biz, since Hollywood does a pretty fine job already rendering itself absurd.  However, this should not deter you from wallowing in the celluloid craziness of the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s show Completely Hollywood (abridged). [Read more...]

Source Festival – Memoria/Bunny, Bunny

The house is set so that the light gauze draping the stage invades the seats of the audience, merging the audience and stage without distinction.  Thus begins Memoria Brassica, an inquisitive experimental piece in which printing, spoken words, and dance unite to form an artistic installment of how memory [Read more...]