All posts by Tim Treanor:
Tim Treanor DCTS Senior Reviewer He's been writing for DCTS for nearly five years. Before that, he acted a bit. He's got a play about Dracula and a novel in the works about population control through infectious diseases. By day, he's a DC trial lawyer whose shoes are stuffed with Pablo Neruda poems.
Travels with My Aunt
August 30, 2010 By 2 Comments
Rep Stage’s Travels with My Aunt, adapted from the Graham Greene novel by Giles Havergal, is a shaggy-dog story with dozens of shaggy dogs, all of them played by Michael Russotto, Nigel Reed, Lawrence Redmond, or Bill Largess, who also plays a real dog (more on that later). [Read more...]
Twelfth Night
August 22, 2010 By 4 Comments
The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Free-For-All Twelfth Night is Shakespeare as seen through rose-petal colored glasses, as evanescent as a summer evening, goofy, cartoonish, foolish and sweet – in short, a comedy, designed to make us giggle and snort, and thereafter go home larkishly happy. It works, too. [Read more...]
Cat’s Cradle
August 13, 2010 By 2 Comments
For two decades during the twentieth century, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. wrote some of the most important fiction coming out of America. The six novels which comprise his earliest and best work – Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, and Slaughterhouse-5 – were a riot of strange concepts and provocative ideas, [Read more...]
Best Plays and Performances of 2009-2010
August 11, 2010 By 6 Comments
Tim Treanor
The 2009-2010 ends awash in melancholy, with the death of a great Washington theater leader following (by mere days!) the death of a promising young actor and singer. These tragic events serve as punctuation for a season we will remember with some sorrow. [Read more...]
Jane Pesci-Townsend 1959 – 2010
August 9, 2010 By 13 Comments
Jane Pesci-Townsend, an old-school musical belter who won accolades as an actor, singer, director and teacher, lost her six-year battle with cancer on August 6, 2010. She passed away peacefully at home, surrounded by her family, close friends and nearly a thousand Facebook messages, which her companions read to her during her intermittent periods of consciousness in her last days. [Read more...]
Arena Stage adds 5 playwrights to its payroll
August 3, 2010 By 1 Comment
Is Arena Stage Launching a New Business Model for Playwrighting?
Arena Stage, which will be introducing its rebuilt $125-million facility to the Washington public in October, may be putting an even more lasting change into effect by giving five playwrights a salary and benefits. Fueled by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the plan, which Arena will administer through its American Voices New Play Initiative, will give each of the selected playwrights wages (described by Arena as a “living” wage and estimated elsewhere to be in the mid-five-figure range), health insurance, other benefits and a $15,000 annual budget for development. [Read more...]
A Walk in the Woods seen with those who may have walked in the woods
July 30, 2010 By 2 Comments
There is a brilliant bit of dialogue in Lee Blessing’s arms-control drama A Walk in the Woods which encapsulates the heartbreak at the core of the play. Now that the American Ensemble Theater’s production has come to an end I can tell it to you. [Read more...]
Twelfth Night is Shakespeare Theatre’s Free for All
July 28, 2010 By 1 Comment
It will be Christmas in August and September as the Shakespeare Theatre Company offers a reprise of its 2008 hit Twelfth Night – so named because it is set on the twelfth night after Christmas – for free at Sidney Harman Hall in the company’s annual Free For All production. [Read more...]
Noises Off
July 27, 2010 By 1 Comment
Robin Housemonger, Britain’s old warhouse of a playwright, has reached the absolute nadir of his miserable oeuvre with Nothing On, which is apparently a farce about fish. Otstar Productions inflicts it on us for three acts, utilizing a cast which is either drunk or insane, or, in the case of Mrs. Clackett (Dotty Otley), both…. [Read more...]
The MacCloskey and Myers Complete Do-It-Yourself Comedy Hour
July 24, 2010 By 1 Comment
The Board of Directors of an international dog-food company once held a meeting, with legendary results. They had just released a new product which represented the cutting edge in canine nutrition. It came, moreover, with the endorsement of leading celebrities, and it was the beneficiary of a smart, well-financed advertising campaign. [Read more...]
