When HBO and Comedy Central’s Lauren Weedman decided to take her comedic sensibilities to the jailhouse and teach a writing workshop, her good intentions were tinged with a sense of noblesse oblige, as Weedman herself would be the first to admit. But we all know where good intentions lead.  Rather than teach a writing course, Weedman winds […]

It started with just a simple toothache…and then everything went wrong. Studio Theatre’s tense, darkly comic production of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s The Golden Dragon follows disparate lives forever changed by a single random event. It’s an arresting allegory for the turmoil plaguing our increasingly intertwined global community. 

Feeling a bit overwhelmed by some of the magnificent productions on DC theater boards, their elegant sets and colorful costumes either enhancing or competing with the luscious language emanating from lushly made-up mouths of too many characters to count without a playbook?  If so, does Studio Theatre have a play for you.

To begin with, The Habit of Art is not a play about an imagined encounter between W.H. Auden and the composer Benjamin Britten, late in their lives. It is a play about a play about this fictional encounter. Imagine Stoppard’s The Invention of Love having a love child with Noises Off, and you begin to […]

Andy Warhol played the deadpan fool but was nobody’s fool. The pop artist is still making money after death. One of his self-portraits sold for $38.4 million in a bidding war at an auction in May, 2011. Now Warhol is alive at Studio Theatre in a glitzy, high-powered, wildly funny musical, with book and lyrics […]

David Cale’s one-man show, The History of Kisses — now in its world premiere run at the Studio Theatre — is a dish best served slow. Set in and around a forlorn lifeguard chair perched on the edge of a nondescript California beach adjacent to a seedy motel, Cale’s creative monologue meanders in and out […]

“I always think a playwright’s job is to let actors do their stuff,” playwright David Ives asserts. “I think what we’re supposed to do is write wonderful things for actors, who are much more important and interesting than we are.” Wow. Did Ives ever get it right with his marvelous Venus in Fur, now receiving […]

Multiply Miss Havisham by three, add Irish accents and a peculiarly compelling sense of the macabre and you have Enda Walsh’s The New Electric Ballroom, the female-driven companion piece to Mr. Walsh’s father and sons play, The Walworth Farce, also being staged at Studio Theatre as part of the New Ireland Festival.

Enda Walsh, the featured playwright of The New Ireland Festival at Studio Theatre, defies easy classification. But one thing is sure: whether he grabs part of the myth of Odysseus and resets it at the bottom of a drained swimming pool as in Penelope or uses the bashed-in skeleton of a London Council flat to […]