The Gilbert and Sullivan Youth Company made another big splash this year with their ship-shape production of H.M.S. Pinafore, which was filled with wonderful performances and gorgeous singing by some of the DC area and Naples, [Read more...]

“Whatever it is, we can work it out. We can make it better.”

So says the well-intentioned but clueless Stanley (Mike Meagher) to Hannah (Aileen Brenner), his suicidal ex-girlfriend, in an early scene in the morbidly fascinating 7 Lessons on Suicide. In a play replete with aspiring suicides, Stanley, the only character who seeks to live, paradoxically suffers from the greatest number of delusions – about life, about the death instinct, about the inner workings of the self-annihilative mind. [Read more...]

This Scheherazade is on steroids and she is not telling tales, she is taking heads!

This world premier play is a direct descendent of the “Arabian Nights” but with a feminist and nearly misanthropic twist, until its eventual happy ending.  A sequel to the medieval Middle Eastern parable stories about the wily Scheherazade, the woman brought to the caliph’s palace to mate followed by swift execution, has been re-imagined and stood very much on its head and with tongue firmly wedged in cheek. [Read more...]

In November of 1998, the novelist and iconoclastic leftist essayist Gore Vidal wrote in Vanity Fair that mass murderer Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah Federal Office building in Oklahoma as a way of lashing out against a Federal government which was itself murderous, and that he, Vidal, shared McVeigh’s view that the United States had turned from a sturdy little republic into an anti-democratic empire. [Read more...]

Picture yourself a 20-something secular humanist, liberal in politics and agnostic in religion. In other words, a  2010 Everyman, smug and complacant and oh so typical.

But now imagine that your penis has a mind of its own. Or as Woody Allen once pointed out, “when the blood rushes to your penis, it leaves your brains behind.”    [Read more...]

Black and Kinky Amongst Brown Waves hits a wonderful stride as soon as Margaux Belotte-Bennett takes the stage and starts her story, inspired by a seven month sojourn to India as part of a work project at Gallaudet University.  What’s a sign-language  teaching, kinky headed sister doing on a Passage to India? Stick around for the journey of a lifetime, luggage and all. [Read more...]