These are the plays that won’t let go. They are there as I drift off to sleep, or, unbidden, come to me during the day. This happens more often now, as work here slows to a close. You probably have your list of best plays and performances. This is not that list. These seem to […]
Review: Fannie Lou Hamer: Speak on It! A soul-stirring message on the power of the vote
Lyndon Johnson is said to have called her an “ignorant niggra.” In Fannie Lou Hamer: Speak on It!, E. Faye Butler brings this so-called “ignorant niggra” – Fannie Lou Hamer – to vibrant, embarrassing and encouraging life. The performance is riveting and subtle. The purported purpose of this production (as mouthed by Fannie Lou Hamer […]
DC citizens speak through Arena Stage’s new film The 51st State
Statehood for the District of Columbia has always been a fraught enterprise. It wasn’t until 1961 that Washington residents could vote for President; and before 1973, Congress appointed DC government’s overseers. The District now has its own Mayor and Council, a non-voting representative in Congress and a “Shadow Senator”, and the right to send electors […]
DCTS Performance Guide for the 2020/2021 theatre season
While planning theatre in the time of Covid requires faith and flexibility on everyone’s part, we thought it valuable to show you the shows our companies hope to present. Some are virtual. Some will be in theatres once that becomes possible. This is a listing of performances. Not included are readings, panels and discussions. We’ll keep […]
Arena Stage starts its 5-play season, January, 2021.
Arena Stage, whose ten-play season was cancelled earlier this year by coronavirus, has announced that it intends to restage in 2021 three of the plays it lost this year. To that contingent, Arena will add a world premiere musical, and stage another musical which it had already slated for the 2020-2021 program year. Arena’s first […]
Recommended shows to catch this weekend
May 22, 2020 Arena Stage Free View below or view later Arena Stage adds filmmaker to its accomplishments with May 22, 2020, a filmed docudrama, directed by Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith, which captures one day in the life of our region. Playwrights, including Audrey Cefaly and Psalmeyene 24, interviewed ten D.C.-Maryland-Virginia people ranging […]
Bring an artist’s performance into your home, or at least to your driveway.
Have you ever wished that your living space could be re-imagined by a set designer? Or that you could gift a personalized greeting or concert by a favorite performer? Or that a theatre artist could help out your landscaping with a new rock garden design? Or maybe you’d like to cheer up a friend or […]
DC theatres open lobbies as safe spaces for Black Lives Matter protestors
Update: Source and The 9:30 Club become the latest venues to open their doors to protestors. With thousands of people planned to gather in DC this weekend to protest police brutality, a number of theaters have joined the #OpenYourLobby movement and announced that they will open their lobbies and bathrooms to allow protestors to rest […]
Director Alan Schneider. Beckett and others trusted him with their world premieres.
One summer evening in 1941, a young graduate student home visiting his parents from Cornell University, attended a performance at Catholic University directed by Walter Kerr. Schneider was so taken with Kerr’s work that he went backstage and told him that he had never before seen anything of such high quality. Alan Schneider had been […]
Review: Celia and Fidel at Arena Stage. Castro and the seduction of power
There are moments in this mesmerizing production of Celia and Fidel during which the entire audience holds its collective breath. We watch as a battle is being fought and a choice is being made. What choice will best move forward the cause of the Cuba’s socialist revolution? What choice will amount to capitulation to the […]
Review: Mother Road, a rip-roaring road drama, buddy comedy, musical, and meditation on what it means to be “American”.
“How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?” So wonders the desperate Joad family in Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” as they burn their belongings before fleeing drought-stricken Oklahoma for a new start in California. Arena Stage’s inventive and moving Mother Road follows Tom Joad’s last living […]
Review: A Thousand Splendid Suns at Arena Stage, a harrowing Afghan drama
Carey Perloff’s opening scene of the staged adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s shattering novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, moves with breathtaking beauty. Two women in one direction and a man in another pull two rug runners slowly passing across the stage in opposite directions; on these rugs are placed their few chief belongings, cultural artifacts recognizably […]
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