We call it love, but deep down inside we know it’s something darker and more complicated. We love our pets, we love our comfortable lives, and we may love our children, but with our life partners we have a fluid, uneasy distribution of power. It is like the relationship the United States used to share with the old Soviet Union, but much more complex and dangerous. Love hurts, but the absence of love hurts worse. As Beatrice (Jenna Sokolowski) observes in this startling Carole Fréchette play, now being given a vigorous staging by the Hub Theatre, if you are in love you have a hand to hold when the endless no comes at the end of your life. [Read more...]

The miracle is not Christmas comes, but that we come to it at all. For eleven months, we snap and tear at each other like ravening dogs, foot soldiers in the war of all against all, but on Christmas we open our hearts and our wallets and cry out, “God bless us, every one!” You don’t have to believe in God to get the point: the human experience is a cooperative venture, and acts of generosity, done in the enchantment of each others’ glow, are far more satisfying than the acquisition of financial wealth. [Read more...]

Here is the story of six members of three exotic species of wildlife who have entertained New Yorkers for over two decades: (1) Silo (Dan Crane) and Roy (Matt Dewberry), two male chinstrap penguins who pair-bonded, built a nest, and hatched and raised a chick in the Central Park Zoo. (2) Pale Male (Dewberry) and Lola (Crane), two red-tailed hawks who built an enormous nest on the twelfth-floor ledge of a Manhattan co-op, where they hatched and raised their young. (3) Paula Zahn (Jjana Valentiner)  and Richard Cohen (Eric Messner), whose marital discord fed the tabloids with allegations of cruelty, infidelity, and financial skullduggery. [Read more...]

It takes a real master to successfully blend comedy, romance, crime drama, and metaphysical mystery into a single play.  Fortunately, talented Canadian playwright Stephen Massicotte is just such a master and his gem of a play, The Clockmaker, receives an equally skillful DC area premiere at The Hub Theatre. [Read more...]

Since the fine dramatic actor Helen Pafumi has written the Hub Theatre’s current offering, Merry, Happy…What? you may be fooled into thinking it is a heavy drama, full of Christmasy angst. It is not!  The company has inaugurated its residency in the John Swayze Theare in Fairfax with something that is every cubic inch a kid’s play, full of kid characters doing things that make sense to kids. And it’s a good one, too. [Read more...]

It is a measure of the Obama Administration’s successful wind-down of the war in Iraq that Dear Sara Jane, Victor Lodato’s complex meditation on the uses of violence now being given a careful and intelligent production by the Hub Theatre, [Read more...]

Energy abounds in We Won’t Pay!  We Won’t Pay! which rips and bounces along in mad-dash silliness.  The text hurls zinger references to hunger, alludes to massive unemployment, invasion of privacy, police-state intrusion, [Read more...]

The characters in Craig Wright’s Pavilion reflect the country’s current state of malaise where optimism collides with regret and heartbreak producing flashes of hope and resilience.   [Read more...]