The playwright Conor McPherson spins ghost stories. He uses spectral encounters as a way of exploring a theme rooted in the human experience: guilt.

Unfinished business is at the heart of Conor McPherson’s play, Shining City, an often potent and truthful accounting of the way we live. Currently onstage at Quotidian Theatre in Bethesda,  Shining City quietly attempts to lay bare no less than the titanic demons that live in the abyss of human alienation – that painful self-awareness that emanates from each man-as-an-island, and the regret and guilt that originates from knowing that your being hurts others’. [Read more...]

Steve LaRocque shines in Quotidian’s No-Frills Cherry Orchard

The peasant-born millionaire Yermolay Alexeyevich Lopakhin often commands center stage in Quotidian Theatre Company’s earnest, no-frills adaptation of  The Cherry Orchard. That is fitting, as actor Steve LaRocque’s creation embodies the spindle around which the ill-fated family of Lyubov Ranevskaya agitates, fusses about, and ultimately crashes up against as the 20th century’s cataclysmic changes take shape. [Read more...]

Anyone can see the effect of oppression upon the oppressed, but what effect does it have on the oppressor? The gift that Athol Fugard gives us in “MASTER HAROLD”…and the boys, now receiving a superb production at Quotidian Theatre, is that he shows us the answer straight on, and with undeniable force. [Read more...]

A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur is a tough play to produce, and for that reason most theaters leave it alone. Williams wrote it in 1979, four years before his death, and like many of his later pieces, it studies character across a limited event horizon. Notwithstanding the work’s challenges, Quotidian Theatre Company delivers an excellent production notable for the sparkling quality of the performances. [Read more...]

TOP PICK. Graceful, elegant, and haunting, The Trip to Bountiful is generally considered Horton Foote’s best work, and at the Bethesda Writer’s Center, Quotidian Theatre Company is lovingly giving it its due. Led by the magnificent Jane Squier Bruns and the rest of director Jack Sbarbori’s perfect-pitch cast, [Read more...]

The justly celebrated Conor McPherson, whose The Weir and Dublin Carol do honor to an Irish storytelling tradition stretching back to Swift, Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, and Wilde, has written an honest, gripping piece [Read more...]

When done well, Edwardian parlor comedies have a way of drawing you into a world of witty repartee and verbal gyrations, even innocent subterfuge wrapped in social grace, honor and respect – characteristics generally lacking in today’s frontal and verbal assaulting society. [Read more...]

Bad news should be given straight up, and immediately, and so I shall. Steve LaRocque, a fine actor, competent director and very decent guy, has here written a Sominex™  tablet  of a play, so dull and tedious that he has managed to turn Monday evening, for the audience, into a week of Mondays. [Read more...]