Charter ends its season

Charter Theater, the Arlington-based company which had made a reputation as a home for original theater by Washington-area playwrights, has indefinitely suspended production, canceling the remainder of its season. Read more

Lie with Me

The house that visitors to Charter Theatre stepped into on Halloween night was a whole new realm of haunted. Inside, the family members in Lie With Me move from scene to scene as various forms of the walking emotionally wounded, breaking long spans of glazed denial with a heated jab and harsh words. Read more

Fat Gay Jew

Stand aside, and let a fat straight Gentile review Fat Gay Jew, the amiable, intermittently funny Mario Baldessari comedy about gays, Jews, and fat guys. Read more

This Perfect World

This Perfect World
by Chris Stezin
directed by John Vreeke
produced by Charter Theatre
reviewed by Tim Treanor

Stay with me here. This is a difficult concept, and I’m not sure I have it right. But is it not possible that there is something in this world called pain envy, being the jealousy that those of us whose lives have been rides on moving sidewalks feel for those who have triumphed through adversity? Read more

Am I Black Enough, Yet

• Am I Black Enough, Yet?                    
• Written by Clinton Johnston
• Directed by George Grant
• Produced by Charter Theater with the Hamner Theatre
• Reviewed by Debbie Minter Jackson

This creative script tackles sensitive, poignant, hilarious even bizarre issues involving race and race relations.  A cast of five lightening quick actors pop into a variety of roles, improv style, and rip roar through scenes that will induce chuckles, bursts of laughter, stunned silence, or even painful acknowledgment of the fractured life scenes depicted on stage.  Written in George C. Wolfe’s Colored Museum type of humor and style, a kind of Wolfe-lite, Am I Black Enough, Yet? has just enough bite to make a point without puncturing, posturing, or preaching.  Read more

F.U. (Forgive Us…)

• F.U. (Forgive Us…what’d you think we meant?)
• By Keith Bridges
• Directed by Joe Banno
• Produced by Charter Theatre
• Reviewed by Steven McKnight

At the start of F.U. (Forgive Us…what’d you think we meant?), the actors break the “fourth wall” between cast and audience with a lengthy yet funny digression about the upcoming show.  They state that they can’t tell the message of the play, but must show it to the audience.    Eighty minutes later we learn there’s not much of a point to the new Charter Theatre production other than the presentation of some mildly entertaining silliness.  Read more

Sleeping and Waking

By Chris Stezin

Produced by Charter Theatre

Reviewed by Debbie Minter Jackson

Plastic model body parts dangle from the ceiling in Chris Stezin’s Sleeping and Waking.   The off-putting display is a constant reminder that the play’s protagonist, Sullivan, well played by Ian Le Valley, is the first successful full body transplant.  Mind you, the play is set sixty years into the future when such biological feats matched the technological advances to make them a reality.  ”These are not my hands.” Sullivan says at the top of the show. Thus begins his quest, wrestling with questions about his own identity, his relationships, and even his faith, now that he’s attached to a different body. Read more

37 Stones

or The Man Who Was a Quarry
Produced by Charter Theatre at Theatre on the Run
Reviewed by Tim Treanor
The “stones” to which the title of this new Mark Charney play refers are kidney stones. These are crystalline structures which attach to the kidney walls of anyone unfortunate enough to be afflicted by them. Eventually, they pass through the genito-urinary system and out through the urethra. The pain is thought to be among the most excruciating experienced by men. If so, 37 Stones is right up there with it.Every moment of this two-hour-and-fifteen-minute experience – some of it funny, some of it sharply observed, much of it well-performed – is an acid-bath swim in the noxious, toxic wastewater of a family so irredeemably depraved as to make the Manson family look like the Osmonds.And – this is the worst part – it’s a comedy.<

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Short Order Stories

by Renee Calarco

Produced by Charter Theatre

by Tim Treanor

I recommend that you interrupt your reading of this review, call Charter Theatre or go to their website, and make reservations to see Short Order Stories right away. Now. I’ll explain later.

The theater critic, in his wisdom and dignity, is commissioned to explain the playwright’s purpose, whether the production achieves it, and, if not, why not. This, in turn, helps the discerning reader determine whether she wishes to spend an evening at the theater in question. But one need not fully understand the laws of gravity to observe an apple fall from a tree. Every so often a play is so good that lovers of quality theater will love it; further explanation is unnecessary. Olney’s magnificent The Heiress was like that last year; this play, while without Olney’s fabulous production values, gives similar satisfaction.

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Big Bird Invades Georgetown

By: Tim Treanor

Monkeyboy

I must tell you at the outset that this play features an enormous Cockatoo. When I say “enormous” I don’t mean big like the bird that Robert Blake, pre-indictment, carried on his shoulder in Berretta. I mean bigger than Totie Fields, bigger than Flipper the Dolphin, bigger than God. Monkeyboy is a meta-bird with a rolling basso profundo voice and a taste for Fox News and Facts of Life, put here on earth to torment his hapless owner, Veronica (a superb Rachel Bridges.)

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