Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s Shining City raises a question about our demons: do we make them up to punish ourselves, or do they exist outside us in the world? For most of the play, the answer seems to be that we are haunted by our actions and their repercussions, the gravest of which may come […]
About Mark Dewey
I Am My Own Wife
I expected Doug Wright’s play I Am My Own Wife to be a different kind of Anne Frank story, one in which the heroine survives by hiding in plain sight. Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, the play’s historical center, was a German transvestite who lived in east Berlin from the 1930s through the 1980s, a time when […]
The Prostate Dialogues – a storyteller’s frank tell-all
I learned a lot from Jon Spelman’s new monologue The Prostate Dialogues. I learned, for example, that prostate glands produce the inert component of semen, which is why all male mammals have them. I learned that a sperm whale’s prostate gland is the size of a watermelon. I learned that BPE stands for Benign Prostate […]
Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play in Frederick
In most ways, In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play gives us what we came to see, argue as we might that we didn’t come to see that. You didn’t? No! We thought it would be, like, a dramatic reading of A Room of One’s Own. That’s baloney. And one of the things that […]
Lumina sheds light on Henry V with musical Brother Hal
There was a lot of melding going on at Round House Theatre/Silver Spring last Saturday night — eras, genres, generations, linguistic styles, political paradigms — and some of the combinations might have seemed beyond the reach of harmony to me: Woody Guthrie and William Shakespeare? Where do they overlap? And is medieval English imperialism like […]
Quotidian takes a leap of faith with Faith Healer
Brian Friel’s play Faith Healer begins with a fact about reality that’s difficult to process: sometimes the miracle will happen. Then what?
STC’s Henry IV Part 2 is Utter Grandeur
Taken together, Parts One and Two of Shakespeare’s Henry IV are so big that they need a category of their own. I left Friday night’s performance of Part Two thinking of cathedrals, which you have to look at first from the top of a hill — to see the architect’s design — then from the […]
Henry IV, Part I
One thing I’ve always wondered about Shakespeare’s Henry plays is why do Hal and Falstaff like each other so much? I understand that Falstaff sees a younger version of himself in Hal, with better chances, and that maybe Hal sees Falstaff as a different kind of king, the ruler of indecent people. But their bond […]
MET’s Lieutenant of Inishmore is brutal beauty
Irish theatre and Irish music sometimes make me wonder if the Irish people have taken liberty with the English language in requital of the liberty that the English people took from them. What better way to give the finger to the country that took away your country’s freedom — and its language — than to […]
Tender Napalm
I’d like to say that Philip Ridley’s new play Tender Napalm tells the story of two lovers trying to help each other recover from a traumatic event, possibly the death of their child, perhaps in a terrorist attack; but to say the play tells the story of anything is to ignore what the play suggests […]
Twelfth Night at Center Stage
Director Gavin Witt’s version of Twelfth Night, now at Center Stage, begins in the lobby, where clips from atmospheric movies like Casablanca, Sullivan’s Travels, and Quai des Brumes play on a big screen. Everybody stops to watch. A banner explains that, “This theatrical jaunt (Twelfth Night) pays homage to Hollywood’s Golden Years and the artistic […]
With Timon, American Shakespeare Center completes the Shakespeare canon
Last week I came to a conclusion: the best way to increase the entertainment value of a mediocre play, like Timon of Athens, is to give it to a repertory theater company. They’ll mix it in with three or four others, including a couple of better ones, and they’ll give the same small group of […]