Lies? Truth? It’s all up for grabs in A Gentleman & A Liar. Brian Curry and I have been performing our show, “The Magic Duel,” at The Mayflower Hotel for over five years. During the lead up to the 2016 elections, there was a lot to joke about. We kept improving and polishing the show, […]
Archives for June 2019
Jayne Atkinson is playing Governor Ann Richards: “If she was alive today, she’d say stop whining and start participating.”
Senators Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand and Amy Klobuchar are, among a mostly male field, serious contenders to be the Democratic Party’s pick for the 2020 presidential race. All of these women owe a bit of gratitude to Ann Richards, the former Texas governor, who connected with people though her smart wit, outspoken feminism […]
Review: Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical at Olney Theatre Center
Mom’s so in denial about having a baby, she’s nine months pregnant and still thinks she’s making it to her ballroom dancing competition in Spain. Shady used car salesman Dad’s hoping to “trade” the new baby in for a boy. We’re only one song in, and we’re starting to get a pretty good window into […]
Lucy Prebble’s Enron kicks off 4615 Theatre Company’s ambitious third season
4615 Theatre Company will launch its third season with two plays in rep by distinguished British playwrights, and will finish with two world premieres by local writers. A woman has a passionate affair with her husband’s close friend — what could be less remarkable than that? But in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, the fact of the […]
Jamie Brickhouse returns to Fringe with his latest: I Favor My Daddy
I never wanted Daddy Poo, my Catholic, conservative, Republican father down in Texas, to know about the priest, or the dwarf or the crack addict. But when you write a memoir about your alcoholism and your sexual peccadillos during those louche days, there’s a big chance he may find out. That’s the beginning of a […]
Review: Touring company of Hamilton is young, impassioned and wildly-talented
Third time still charms with Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s game-changing, blood-drumming 2015 musical about Alexander Hamilton, whom he describes in his syncopated, ear-worm lyrics as a “$10 bill Founding Father without a father.” Having had the privilege of seeing the original Broadway cast of Hamilton twice, there was some curiosity about how the touring company would […]
A fascination of 1850’s Europe, An Evening with Lola Montez snatches this woman from obscurity.
In 1937, the German playwright, activist Ernst Toller lived in Hollywood. He was public enemy number one of the Nazi regime, from which he was an exile. He was also one of the first German refugee writers to sign a contract to write for the movies. He worked at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Toller worked on two screenplays […]
H. P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu. Directing with the monster in the room
Our work in DC and Baltimore started with Edgar Allan Poe. We partnered up with the Poe Society in Baltimore and we’re sort of living in this space of the darker side of human motivation and obsession. H. P. Lovecraft is widely considered to be an inheritor of a tradition that Poe started and so […]
Conversations. A deeply personal Fringe show about a daughter’s love for her father
Age 19. I was getting off the plane from Kenyon College to be home for Thanksgiving Break. My dad had colon cancer, but I didn’t think it was serious. My mom picked me up, and before I could talk to her about how finals were going, she said, “Your father is going to die within […]
All for the Union: three women ran a pro-Union newspaper in the heart of the Confederacy
Spent many years waiting for the right play of mine to head to the Fringe again. Loved the experience in 2010 and plan to love it all over again with this show. But it’s a very different sort of show than Case 22. Very different. I’m a playwright and Director, but I started life as […]
Review: Pantheon from Happenstance Theater
Are you aware that most of the Greek and Roman gods can be found working in Brooklyn? It’s not much of a stretch: whether driving the Chariot of the Sun, ferrying the dead, or guarding the entrance to Hades, the gods have jobs, just like us. With Pantheon, Happenstance Theater takes this unlikely conceit and […]
Zombies move into Wilder’s Our Town in Capital Fringe show Our Town Plus Zombies
I’ve been in Our Town five different times in my acting career, from college to community to summer stock to regional over a twenty year span. I have played or understudied nearly every adult male character. Very often I wound up in the Act III chorus of the Dead, where I’d usually doze off in […]