Two one acts by Shaw at Washington Stage Guild open with the master playwright’s own words, not about romantic coquetry or love and devotion, but  about sex.  What he’s talking about is upfront and out there, it’s scandalous sex, which he explores to the max in the first adorable of two one acts presented.  [Read more...]

Playing Molnár, the Hungarian playwright born in Budapest, is a little like snowboarding. You have to ride the dialogue well forward and stay dangerously fast and loose to get plenty of air and lift off. [Read more...]

This simply presented production exemplifies the astonishing power of theatre to unexpectedly grab your heart and carry you off into an adventure of the soul.

It was an unexpectedly warm day in January, and I, for one, wanted to romp outside. But I knew what Washington Stage Guild is capable of, and so made my dutiful pilgrimage downtown as a theatre reviewer. I came away awed, acknowledging to myself what a shame it would have been to miss this authentic and most moving piece of theatre.  I am both humbled and inspired by some of the best acting I have seen on the DC stage, indeed ever seen anywhere. [Read more...]

If your last name is an adjective, people are bound to have some fun on your behalf. For Thornton Wilder, at least, the puns are well-earned. Two of his best known plays — the quiet confidences of Our Town and the rambunctious time-warp that is The Skin Of Our Teeth — are wilder works indeed, stretching our understanding of what can happen onstage. [Read more...]

Do we really need the British monarchy? As if on cue, The Washington Stage Guild’s The Apple Cart: A Political Extravaganza, one of George Bernard Shaw’s most challenging political satires, opened on the weekend of the wedding of William and Catherine, a prince and a commoner. The twinkly-eyed playwright would have loved the fortuitous timing.

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We have the culprit, officer, in Washington Stage Guild’s production of Michael Hollinger’s faux-noir gumshoe dramady, Red Herring. Really, it’s obvious – I figured it out in the first few minutes. It’s the tiny stage, officer. Arrest it, and if it gives you any trouble, shoot to kill. [Read more...]

To the earliest humans, everything was magic, from the rising and setting of the Sun to the way that flint could change a pile of dry sticks and leaves into a fire. That is to say, the everyday processes by which they lived were incomprehensible to them, and they called upon their invisible gods (usually through the medium of priests) to grow their crops, protect their animals and make the people fertile and prosperous. The priests would bestow blessings, sprinkle things with water and arrange for human sacrifices as necessary. [Read more...]

Washington Stage Guild opened its  season with a thoughtful and thought-provoking production of Crispin Whittell’s Darwin in Malibu.  In many ways, in spite of its California Dreamer-style title,  Darwin is less a play than a philosophical disputation carried on among three pivotal 19^th century intellectuals whose restless spirits suddenly find themselves—bodies intact—transported to a present-day California beach house. [Read more...]

Here is a play about – and I hope this is not a spoiler – three people who are the best of friends, mostly taken from the letters they wrote to each other. You see the problem immediately: friendship is ennobling and a great bulwark against the world’s cares, but unless it is tested in some way, it is not the stuff of great drama. [Read more...]