With raw emotion, dashes of humor, and a bold style, Judge Me Not comes out swinging from its first moments. Broken hearts, abused bodies, life and death – all the ups and downs of a group of African-American characters are laid bare in this exciting entry into the 2019 Capital Fringe Festival. Wrapping up with […]

Matt Dundas doesn’t let facts get in the way of telling a good story, particularly if they are making fun of politicians past and present. His one-man show, performed as a walk along Pennsylvania Avenue, weaves together tales from his own life with potshots at the powerful and feels like an entertaining game of historical […]

Upbeat and whimsical, The Face Zone meanders between philosophical musings and autobiographical tales in a Sark-esque combination of drawings and poetry. Bopping from thought to thought, Martin Graff’s one-man show is like going to a jam-packed party where you brush up against a lot of eclectic folks, but you don’t get fully introduced to any […]

Catchy musical numbers and an intoxicated Pierre L’Enfant drawing D.C.’s confusing street layout were the highlights of E Pluribus Screw ‘Em!, a hit-and-miss sketch-comedy-musical-political-satire show that left the audience alternating between laughter and awkward silence. On the plus side, the pacing of the show was spot-on, with musical numbers interspersed with sketch comedy routines, almost […]

Let’s get this out of the way first. Two Gentlemen of Verona is not Shakespeare’s worst play. Not by a long shot; not in a universe which has Timon of Athens and Coriolanus and Two Noble Kinsmen. Two Gents has its problems; it was Shakespeare’s first play and was thus more bound to 16th-century conventions […]

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 […]

In 33 1/3 Chorus Girls, seven comedic sketches are linked by the loose thread of “show business.” A klutzy stand-up comedienne tells academic jokes about Harry Potter, surrounded by hecklers. Juliet tries to rewrite her own story in “Romeo and Juliet.” The list continues. 33 1/3 Chorus Girls leans meta at times, breaking the fourth […]

It’s probably safe to say that We’re All Going to Fucking Die! is the only Fringe show where you stand a chance at taking home a prostate massager. Despite the cheekily morbid title, this brainchild of Twanna A. Hines, a sexual and reproductive health educator, is mostly about embracing pleasure while we’re actually here on […]

Surfacing: An Inventory of Helplessness is less a story than a meditation on a condition. And the condition is grim. A (Yvonne Paretsky) seeks refuge in Vienna. The law is that if she can escape deportation for six months, she cannot be removed until her refugee status is resolved. So she hides, under unspeakable conditions, […]

With its clever script by playwright Iris Dauteman, Hatpin Panic weaves a terrific Mobius strip of a largely unknown scrap of history from America’s turn of the century women’s suffrage movement, and joins it with history still in the making. It’s superb, due not only to the script, but to the fine direction by Jenny […]