That Face

Oh, those English boarding school girls—they are such scamps, hazing a hapless 13-year-old student (Angela Welchbrodt) in an S&M ritual that involves a torture hood, restraints and a too-liberal dose of Mummy’s Valium, and in their off-hours tramping around and boozing it up with their peers. Read more

In the Red and Brown Water

Partially inspired by Yerma, Federico Garcia Lorca’s masterwork about a woman yearning in vain for fertility, Tarell Alvin McCraney‘s In the Red and Brown Water explores similar themes, only steeped in mythology and legends with West African influence. Read more

The Solid Gold Cadillac

What do you get when you take a 1953 classic, update it with snazzy new seats, carpeting and accessories, but keep the chassis?   In Studio Theatre’s fitfully entertaining retrofit of Howard Teichmann and George S. Kaufman’s The Solid Gold Cadillac, what you get is a chance to spend a couple of entertaining hours in the company of a dozen D.C. classics, Read more

Adding Machine’s Director, Mr. Zero and Shrdlu

I fell in love with Adding Machine: A Musical in 2007, when I saw the Off-Broadway production at The Minetta Lane Theatre. As I write this,  I am about to see Studio Theatre’s production for the third time Read more

Adding Machine: A Musical – TOP PICK!

Adding Machine is less a musical than a high mass of low events; a spiraling nightmare set to a gorgeous, angelic score. It is a story of ordinary people, who are never idealized and at the same time never the subject of condescension, getting what is coming to them. Read more

Moonlight

Harold Pinter’s rarely performed one-act play is classic Pinter: conflicted characters using dagger-sharp wit and caustic irony to compensate for deep-seated, unspoken doubts and fears. Read more

Fucking A

Caught in the crosshairs of Nathanial Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter” and the stranglehold of slavery, with miscreant bounty hunters running around, singing, wearing kilts, Read more

The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking is a reflective look at the most difficult time in her life. As a world-class writer, Didion resorts to her craft to help clarify her own thoughts Read more

Radio Golf

How can African Americans achieve success in a country where they still are a minority in numbers and wealth?  That’s the intriguing issue posed by Radio Golf, the last play in August Wilson’s twentieth century cycle.  Read more

Rock ‘n’ Roll

“What you like about brains,” a Czech emigrant classics student named Lenka tells the Communist Cambridge philosophy don Max in Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, “… is that they all work in the same way. What you don’t like about minds is that they don’t.” Read more

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