Dating is fun. Wait, did I say fun? I meant horrible. Dating is horrible. One would think our hyper-information-digital-social age would soften the blow – or at least weed out the crazies – but the truth remains: While previous generations settled down faster and younger, Generation Y remains on their own unique domestic timeline. However […]
Archives for July 2014
The Duchess of Malfi
The beauty of the language and the brutality of this Duchess of Malfi lingered in my mind’s eye for days after the cast took their final bows. Rhymed couplets curled through the air as an assassin’s hand went to work throughout John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. The DC-based classical theatre company We Happy Few […]
The Goddess Diaries
The simplicity of The Goddess Diaries only adds to its brilliance. The single prop on stage is a giant ship’s wheel. A woman in white (Kim Posthumus) tells us that, since ancient times, the wheel has been used as a symbol for time. The wheel can represent both a single year and a single lifetime.
Medea’s Got Some Issues
After 2,445 years of hearing every other side of her story, it’s finally time for Medea to speak her mind. Yeah, she may have flown off in a golden chariot pulled by a dragon, leaving her hubby Jason alone to mourn over the bodies of their two murdered children. And she also may have given […]
Balloon Plays
Like man discovering fire, watching three clowns discovering balloons for the first time is both magical and momentous. Imagine the possibilities, the comedy, and all the things you can make with balloons!
Breast In Show
Breast In Show is something of a different beast for the DC Fringe Festival, and on opening night you could see it in the composition of the audience: many older theater-goers, women and men in their 50’s-70’s, many survivors (or “warriors” as the show names them) of and supporters of those that have been diagnosed […]
À Demain
Let’s cut to the chase: À Demain has the greatest performances of one of the finest scripts I have seen in years. I struggle to think of its equal — As You Like It at the Folger? Something professionally produced, no doubt, and this is all from a group of college students and recent grads.
A Lesbian Belle Tells!
The main stage at the Goethe Institut is set like a Southern living room — a rocking chair, a small side table and what appears to be a glass of sweet tea perched atop it. As I take my seat, Katy Perry’s unforgettable I Kissed a Girl begins to play, and I almost burst out laughing.
Marriage, Lizards and Love
My father was an opera singer, sometimes still hums “toreador en garde” around the house, so when the arias flowed between scenes in Marriage, Lizards, and Love I was delighted.
Mobile Personal Series
“Is this Ghostbusters?” one little girl shrieks as an almost hazmat-clad figure pushes a strange mechanical contraption along the sidewalk facing the White House. Her mother quiets her, then asks, “Why he got a mask on, pushing that machine?”
Bargain Basement University
Bargain Basement University provides a service sought worldwide: a quick and easy Bachelor of the Arts program, conveniently located around Fort Fringe, by which I mean it provides a brutally honest look at the current state of higher education. The stand, resembling an apple cart on a pair of bicycle wheels, bears a screen printer […]
The Old Man Never Let It Go
Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea could work on stage as a Samuel Beckett play. The old man Santiago, alone in a boat on the open water, reeling in an impossible fish, despairing and reveling in the simple human condition of kill and eat. Good, dark, woe-is-man stuff, right?