What takes precedent: individual privacy, or public information? Right to Be Forgotten, making its world premiere at Arena Stage, is remarkably nuanced in its exploration of the big debates in Internet privacy law. The titular principle has been adopted in the European Union to allow individuals to petition search engines to de-list links to pages […]
About Hannah Berk
Review: The Finger. U.S. debut of Kosovo play at Venus Theatre
How do we navigate our private and shared griefs? How do we buoy others up as we cope, and how do we drag them down? These are central questions in Kosovar playwright Doruntina Basha’s play The Finger, produced in English for the first time by Venus Theatre in the playwright’s self-translation. We bear witness to […]
Review: Or, from Theatre Prometheus
The title, Or, with its provocative comma, suggests the production’s playful attitude toward binaries—in gender, sexuality, and morality. Brought to Capitol Hill Arts Workshop by Theatre Prometheus, a company dedicated to centering “women-focused, diverse narratives,” it introduces us to Aphra Behn, one of the first female playwrights to earn her living primarily through her written […]
Review: American Spies and Other Homegrown Fables
American Spies and Other Homegrown Fables emanates an understated sensory clash before any actor sets foot on stage. The play’s world is a simple 1940s living room and bedroom, decked out in all the furnishings and fabrics to place it comfortably in any American suburb. The pre-show soundtrack alternates between the songs you’d expect to […]
Capital Fringe review: An Eye for an Eye
There’s nothing like a Greek tragedy to go from zero to 100 in just over an hour. In this case, we go from the broodings of a slighted god to a mother wielding her own son’s head on a pike. In An Eye for an Eye, director Mediombo Singo Fofana has staged a strong rendition […]
Review: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Brecht’s warning about fascism at Scena Theatre
Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (trans. George Tabori) presents us with a familiar story: a churlish Chicago mobster slashes and wheedles his way to the top. This time, it’s the top of the city’s cauliflower game. In case that doesn’t ring a bell, Scena Theatre’s production offers up Brecht’s suggested projections, orienting […]
Review: Antigonick and The Fragments of Sappho from Taffety Punk
“how to translate [Antigone]?”, Anne Carson self-reflexes in her translator’s note to the Sophokles classic. “I take inspiration from John Cage who, when asked / how he composed 4’33”, answered / ‘I built it up gradually out of many small pieces of silence.’” I begin with the translator because Taffety Punk’s double feature of Antigonick […]
Review: The Dupont Under(world). The passages between life and death await you.
Tradition Be Damned (TBD) Immersive, DC’s first large-scale immersive theater company, isn’t interested in designing shows for audiences to watch. They want to create worlds for participants to explore, with the stated goal of generating “new opportunities for empathy and engagement.” Immersive theater offers exciting avenues for blurring the lines between reality and fiction, between […]
Review: Siwayul (Heart of a Womxn), an act of reclamation for indigenous trans people
“Our work is ceremony, because, to us, art is ceremony,” writes Alexa Elizabeth Rodriguez in her Director’s Note. This is the experience of Siwayul (Heart of a Womxn): the audience is witness to and participant in a ceremony of remembrance and healing. We travel an emotional arc more than an imposed narrative one, moving through […]
Review: Silent, spectacular performance from Dublin’s Fishamble
It’s a rare gift for a play to present a despairing character with both lightness and the sincerity he deserves. Silent and its subject, Tino, are by turns funny, bleak, and feverish, but always riveting. One minute into this show, as Tino slowly emerges from beneath a blanket on stage in a kind of haunting, […]
Review: Next Stop: North Korea. John Feffer’s latest looks inside the world’s most secretive society
Few foreign lands loom larger in the American imagination than North Korea, despite and because the average outsider knows almost nothing about the country. We’re in the dark by design: the U.S. restricts and currently bans tourist travel, the North Korean Central News Agency emits pure propaganda every day, and our countries’ diplomatic communications are […]
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