Shakespeare Theatre Company shifts the tone of their season this spring with Harold Pinter’s Old Times, directed by Artistic Director Michael Kahn. Pinter’s play, first produced in 1971, explores a love triangle between Anna (Holly Twyford), Kate (Tracy Lynn Middledorf), and Deeley (Steven Culp) under the stark white focus of a living room during one […]
Interview with playwright Sam Forman
Sam Forman is back in town, and, for a 34-year-old playwright who has spent much of his life writing stories of nervous, young men whose ambitions crash up against their daily insecurities, he’s surprisingly calm. As Forman looks ahead to the opening of The Moscows of Nantucket, premiering at Theater J on Wednesday, he shows […]
DC director/playwright Bob Bartlett on “MASTER HAROLD” … and the boys
Bob Bartlett is a big, friendly, generous guy who easily wraps his arms around every project and everyone. As a friend, I’ve had a front row seat in his life for the last 10 years. I have watched actors readily sign on to be directed by him, and volunteers show up to sweep out a […]
Director Matt August on Liberty Smith
Matt August returns to direct Ford’s Theatre’s world premiere of the musical Liberty Smith following up on the popular run of his direction of A Christmas Carol, that played at Ford’s from 2004 through 2008. His previous directorial credits include the Broadway production of How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2006, 2007) and subsequent national tours […]
Mike Daisey takes on Apple and Steve Jobs
Armed only with a glass of water, a skeletal outline, and perhaps a rush of adrenaline, monologist Mike Daisey delivers unscripted, hours-long meditations on life, theater, and politics. Embellishing his astute grasp of trade politics and technology with personal stories and gonzo journalism, Daisey weaves intricate yarns that are at once moving, informative, and darkly […]
Blue Man Group’s David Traver
Blue Man Group and its multi-media experience comes to the Warner Theatre on March 23rd for a brief 12-day run of their first ever touring version of a theatrical production. The organization, which now has over 50 employees, was founded in New York City in 1987 by three friends – Phil Stanton, Chris Wink and […]
Oedipus el Rey – the director’s point of view
Michael John Garcés is the Artistic Director of Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles, where he has both written and directed productions that explore diversity, community, and shared history. DC Theatre Scene spoke recently with Garcés about his experience directing the play by Luis Alfar, and about the opportunities and challenges of adapting a classical […]
Michael Bobbitt’s Excellent Adventure
An interview with director/writer/choreographer and Artistic Director of Adventure Theatre Michael J. Bobbitt Michael J. Bobbitt is a dreamer and he dreams not impossible but big, good, do-able dreams. Bobbitt is no pie-in-the sky kind of dreamer. He’s the kind that makes dreams happen.
Philip Goodwin on playing Kenneth Tynan
Philip Goodwin may be from Maine, he may live in New York, and have trained in England, but around here, he’s a Washington actor. Goodwin feels the pull himself. “I have some of that New England reserve, I supposed, and I was cast in Shakespeare plays a lot because of my training, and I live […]
Joe Banno
Washington is full of hidden treasures, especially when it comes to culture and entertainment. You know – the concerts at many of the city’s museums and cultural institutions, from the National Gallery of Arts concerts, to the Millennium Stage at the Kennedy Center to the Tuesday performances at the Church of the Epiphany. Things like […]
Anna Deavere Smith
Back in the 1990s, when I first saw Fires in the Mirror, a play about a conflict in which African Americans and Orthodox Jews battled in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, I wanted to meet Anna Deavere Smith. That play was amazing, it broke new ground and introduced like a mini-explosion a talented, gifted, […]
Red Bastard is coming to town, and he’s no Santa Claus
Who is this man, this beast, this Red Bastard? He is not – to reassure readers of a certain age – Joe Stalin, back from the dead. Nor is he Christopher Hitchens, who some consider a well-read bastard. He is, instead, a roly-poly anti-clown, as red as a fire-truck, a provocateur, a confronter, a producer […]