RS/24 is an ethereal drama about one long night in the life of Herbie, a record store owner (writer and director Clayton LeBouef, the veteran actor is best known for his performances in “Law and Order: Criminal Intent” and “HBO’s The Wire.”) Audience members, drawn into the small black box theater of the Anacostia Playhouse […]
About Angela Carroll
Review: Breathe – a new transformative musical
Breathe is a transformative work written and directed by Cleavon Meabon IV about the resilience of an African-American family trying to establish balance in the face of white violence. An announcer from TheARC stood before the sold out opening night crowd to offer a word of warning. “You will go through a range of emotions” he […]
Disgraced from Compass Rose Theater (review)
Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize winning Disgraced is a thoughtful character study about American Muslim identity. Driven by casual conversations, the play reveals earnest and unsettling disclosures about the perceptions and misconceptions we all maintain and project about those with differing world views. Compass Rose Theater offers a fresh production with direction from James Bunzli at […]
The Intruders takes on gentrification in DC (review)
Hope Lynne Price-Lindsay’s The Intruders is an entertaining satire about the contemporary wave of gentrification in DC that packs lots of laughs, but fails to do more than scratch the surface of a pressing issue. Directed by Vera J. Katz, and produced by The New Millennium Howard Players, The Intruders is one of over one […]
Teen drama, Count Down, Strand’s entry in Women’s Voices Theater Festival (review)
Count Down, one of many extraordinary plays included in this year’s Women’s Voices Theater Festival, is an emotional drama about teenage girls living in a group home in Chester, New Jersey. Playwright Dominique Cieri based it on her experiences teaching in a similar home.
Violence versus pacifism . Brown versus Douglass. The Raid at Theater Alliance (review)
“Everyone in this play is dead,” Harriet Tubman (Tiffany Byrd) announces minutes into the first act. Frederick Douglass (Marquis D. Gibson), John Brown (Nicklas Aliff), Henry Kagi (Josh Adams), Emperor (Dylan J. Fleming), John Brown Jr. (Robert Bowen Smith), and Mahala Doyle (Moira Todd), speak directly to the audience from seats among us, and introduce […]
Danai Gurira’s comedy Familiar at Woolly Mammoth Theatre (review)
Familiar, by Tony Award winning playwright Danai Gurira, is an intimate comedy-drama set in the home of a first-generation Zimbabwean family living in Minnesota. The family has gathered over the weekend to celebrate and prepare for the winter wedding of their eldest daughter, Tendi (Sharina Martin) to Chris, her white fiancé, (Drew Kopas). Audiences engage with the […]
Red Velvet, the real life story of actor Ira Aldridge at Chesapeake Shakespeare (review)
In the early 19th century, Ira Aldridge, an African American actor and playwright, was performing on European stages. A fraction of Aldridge’s miraculous story is portrayed in director Shirley Basfield Dunlap’s wonderful adaptation of Lolita Chakrabarti’s play, Red Velvet at the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company in Baltimore, MD.
On manhood and memory: In Search of My Father (review)
“Just what kind of man would abandon his son?” This is the central question writer/performer W. Allen Taylor has been asking in his twenty-year running play In Search of My Father … Walkin’ Talkin’ Bill Hawkins now at Atlas Performing Arts Center.