Small Craft Warnings

Draw up a chair at Monk’s Place and have yourself a cold glass of Tennessee Williams. Believe me when I tell you that this is not a bar where you will want everyone to know your name. Small Craft Warnings is a story about lonely losers at a seedy seaside bar; a character study of characters whose strength of character has slipped away. Read more

The Cherry Orchard

The Cherry Orchard
by Anton Chekhov, translated by Laurence Senelick
Directed by Christopher Henley and Gaurav Gopalan
Produced by Washington Shakespeare Company
Reviewed by Debbie Minter Jackson

The Cherry Orchard is a fitting final production for the Washington Shakespeare Company to end its stay at the Clark Street Playhouse, and the full capacity crowd on opening night was eager to celebrate WSC’s legacy.  The play, often seen as a cultural microcosm with ruminations about life and death, family, love and money, covers all the bases with a hearty cast of 16 characters to tell the embedded stories.   Co-directors Christopher Henley and Gaurav Gopalan create a world of fantasy and farce to relay the alarmingly relevant passages that mirror the state of our own affairs in this day and time. Read more

All’s Well that Ends Well

All’s Well that Ends Well
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Joe Banno
Produced by Washington Shakespeare Company
Reviewed by Steven McKnight

All’s Well that Ends Well is famously known as one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” the kind that most companies would shy away from tackling unless they have a name like the Washington Shakespeare Company.  Talented director Joe Banno’s clever touches and a game lead performance by Mundy Spears provide an interesting and at times diverting piece of entertainment, but WSC has not solved all of the play’s problems and at times the production flags. Read more

Peace

Peace
By Callie Kimball
Produced by Washington Shakespeare Company
Directed by Alexander Strain
Reviewed by Tim Treanor 

This, this is why Washington theaters need to produce Washington playwrights - because Washington playwrights understand what Washington audiences want to see from their theaters. We don’t want plays about politics. We work in politics all day, and many of us for several hours afterward. We want to see plays about the things which make politics important in the first place: Read more

Red Noses

Red Noses
By Peter Barnes
Produced by the Washington Shakespeare Company
Directed by Jay Hardee and John Geoffrion
Reviewed by Tim Treanor
Red Noses is a deadly earnest meditation on the redemptive power of laughter, a soggy, self-sabotaging pudding of a play not advanced by the Washington Shakespeare Company’s strident production of it. Imagine the work of the great George Carlin

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Hedda Gabler

• Hedda Gabler
• By Henrik Ibsen
• Adapted by Andrew Upton
• Directed by Christopher Henley
• Produced by Washington Shakespeare Company
• Reviewed by Tim Treanor

“Love is a way to sweeten obligation,” says Hedda Gabler (Heather Haney), the anti-Valentine. In Washington Shakespeare Company’s fiercely ambitious production of Ibsen’s 19^th-century classic, love and obligation are at war and the winner is death. Read more

The House of Yes

• The House of Yes
• By Wendy MacLeod
• Directed by Colin Hovde
• Produced by Washington Shakespeare Company
• Reviewed by Tim Treanor

The House of Yes is by a significant margin the scariest show I have seen on stage this year. It is not a dark comedy, as some suggest, or a comedy at all. It is a horror show. It is much the same as Ripley Scott’s classic horror movie Alien, except that in the movie an animal bursts out of some poor guy’s stomach. What happens in House of Yes is much worse. Read more

Kafka’s Dick

• By Alan Bennett
• Directed by Joe Banno
• Produced by Washington Shakespeare Company
• Reviewed by Tim Treanor

Kafka’s Dick is a play about…you know.  No, wait, that’s not entirely true. Although his…you know…is involved, it’s really a play about Kafka coming back from the dead.  Imagine this: “Kafka was dead: to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner…” Read more

Caligula

• Caligula
• By Albert Camus
• Directed by Chris Henley
• Produced by Washington Shakespeare Company
• Reviewed by Tim Treanor

Is there anything that Alexander Strain cannot do?  In the title role of Washington Shakespeare’s Caligula, Strain is man and superman, a protean philosopher-tyrant, a Killer without a Cause.  Is he mad?  Is he genius?  Is he a Prometheus, duty-bound to bring the fire of nihilism to humanity?  Yes, and in Strain’s astonishing performance, he is more than that: an incandescent Saint Satan of Pain, a roaring, retching emperor of annihilation, the King of Nothingness.  And, like the real Caligula, he does a great deal of it in drag. Read more

Private Lives

Private Lives

By Noel Coward

Produced by Washington Shakespeare Company

Reviewed by Janice Cane

Washington Shakespeare Company is serving up a bite of fun almost as delectable as the fare offered just beyond the stage at 1409 Playbill Café. Almost. A day later, I’m still salivating over the meal I enjoyed before seeing Noël Coward’s Private Lives, but the play itself is quickly becoming a memory. Read more

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