Emma (Katie Atkinson), an assistant in a laboratory dedicated to the preservation of dying languages, is trying to learn Esperanto. She is having heavy weather of it. Finally she blurts out “I love George,” – George is her married boss at the lab. The instructor (Kerri Rambow) commands her – in Esperanto, of course – to reveal her feelings to George immediately. It is the most shocking thing anyone could say to her: “Tell him? I couldn’t!” she replies, and there, in a nutshell, is The Language Archive, a play about how to fail to communicate, in the sixty-nine hundred languages known in the world today. [Read more...]

Revolution. The word is brimming with power, strength, and a sensationalist quality of seduction.  America tends to salivate over a good old tale of revolution, sometimes getting so hungry for the next that it neglects to reflect and fully grasp previous movements which have given the world its shape. Perhaps my history classes were too rudimentary, or perhaps I was busy devouring theatre and other literature to give the Romanian Revolution the good, hard look it deserved, but after the Forum Theatre’s wholly striking production of Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill, I’m compelled to learn more.  In fact, director Michael Dove’s beautifully human and fearlessly directed piece may compel enough to be seen a second time. [Read more...]

You are in the lobby of Round House Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland, in America, waiting to get into Forum’s bobrauschenbergamerica. The problem is that you don’t know whether you’ve actually wandered into the play or not. The walls are festooned with American flag bunting. An attractive young woman in a floral dress enters, carrying a gaggle of balloons. Is she part of the play? Or here is a young girl wearing a helmet and in-line skates (Kallei Isaac). Surely she is! But what about that very tall man with the backpack in the corner? Or the young woman with the surprisingly bright red lipstick? Here’s somebody dressed up as Post critic Peter Marks! Oh, wait, that is Peter Marks. bobrauschenbergamerica is not about art in America – it’s about the art of America. Another way to say this is that it is about you. [Read more...]

If Angels in America, given magnificent voice by Forum Theatre last year, showed us what love in the age of plague was like, Naomi Wallace’s One Flea Spare shows us plague spread out on a loveless plain, where pain thrives in the absence of mercy. Another way to say this is that One Flea Spare is a play about a month spent in Hell; it is a hell of a play, and Forum plays the hell out of it. [Read more...]

The artists of Forum Theatre are wonderfully accomplished folks. Even without taking their modest budget and ticket prices into consideration, Forum is one of the best theaters in Washington. Their Angels in America, Part I – Millennium Approaches was the best play I saw in Washington last season, [Read more...]

The Frau reclines into her seat, smoking a fine cigar; she distracts herself with artistic integrity, blissfully ignorant of the stomping boots of war outside her studio. This duly summarizes Jordan Harrison’s Amazons and their Men as presented by Forum Theatre.  [Read more...]