Blink and you miss it. This life goes roaring by, and on lesser days we end up standing dazed by the wayside. If you blinked more slowly – if you really shut your eyes, took a breath, and sent your passion right into the dark path of those fleeting minutes and seconds – could you slow down time? Or, stop it entirely? [Read more...]

Few nightmares rival those of a parent whose child has gone missing, even if that child is a young adult.  Yet this nightmare was far too common in Argentina during the 1970s following a military coup as police frequently picked up young people suspected of being anti-government subversives.  Writer-performer Jennifer S. Jones chooses this setting for Letters to Clio – Part II, Margarita, the second in her international series about the voices of suffering women. [Read more...]

If you have ever suffered through an interminably bad recital or talent show, you may be a little nervous about attending Ridgefield Middle School Talent Nite.  But go anyway. The show is a nice comic vehicle for two former Wesleyan University students (who look much younger) and one of the better comic offerings of The Capital Fringe Festival. [Read more...]

The program of Fringe Youth–Led Producers is a composite of monologues written and performed by D.C. high schoolers.  Through writing exercises and group discussion, young people get a chance to take the stage, sometimes for the first time in their lives, and share their own life lessons.

The dedication and genuine affection from the Fringe staff and organizers for the students is obvious as everyone prepares for the big event.  The culmination of their work will be presented again at the Thursday evening (July 22) jam session which will feature themes of self-expression and respect.

In the spirit of a coaching and learning experience, the event is unrated, but watching young people find their voice is always a good time.   (Note— new anticipated program length is 30 minutes)

Read all the reviews and check out the full Capital Fringe schedule here.

Did you see the show?  What did you think?

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...]