I can’t remember a time when I was NOT hooked on performing. My Mama played ‘Let’s pretend’ with my sister and me in the kitchen back when I was four and five years old and I loved it. I was cast as the third good fairy in The Sleeping Beauty in third grade; that was […]
Review: Bloomsday at Washington Stage Guild
Are there any two more painful and provocative words in the English language than “what if”? Steven Dietz’s Bloomsday is a sensitive time-bending romance looking at one consequential day when a 20-year-old American tourist meets an Irish lass in Dublin in this Washington Stage Guild area premiere Both are haunted over the next 35 years […]
7 upcoming plays which are about to tell us where we lost our humanity and where we can find it again.
Tim Treanor was asked to recommend 7 plays for the lecture DC Theatre Season 2020 held January 14 in the Smithsonian’s S. Dillon Ripley Center. Since we’ve had several requests for his remarks, we publish it here, along with our thanks to the other critics Chris Klimek (Washington City Paper),Nicole Hertvik (DC Metro Theater Arts) […]
Review: Hard Times from Washington Stage Guild
With steam wafting from the factories painted across the backdrop of Washington Stage Guild’s production of Hard Times, it doesn’t take long before issues about industry and social progress take center stage. Hard Times by Charles Dickens considers the importance of pragmatism and facts and the rise of capitalism while grappling with the reality of […]
Review: George Bernard Shaw’s Candida at Washington Stage Guild
Ruminations about love and passion abound in George Bernard Shaw’s Candida. Written and first performed in a past century (1898), questions of what makes a successful marriage feel right at home today with top notched actors exploring the witty interchanges in the context of Victorian propriety. It’s telling that the title character is one of […]
Until Candida at WSG, this married couple had given up hope of ever performing on the same stage.
The Washington Stage Guild, renowned for its delightful stagings of “house playwright” George Bernard Shaw, kicks off its 2019-20 season with one of his earliest comedies, Candida, directed by Laura Giannarelli, Sept. 26 through Oct. 20. Married couple Emelie Faith Thompson and Nathan Whitmer, take on the roles of wife and husband Candida and Reverend […]
Review: Resolving Hedda, whip-smart and hilarious
“We’re in a strange relationship with our fiction, you see,” Warren Ellis, the English comic-book writer, novelist, and screenwriter, once wrote. “Sometimes we fear it’s taking us over, sometimes we beg to be taken over by it… and sometimes we want to see what’s inside it.” In Jon Klein’s Resolving Hedda, currently being brought to […]
Gulf View Drive review at Washington Stage Guild. Masterful.
For Washington Stage Guild patrons, the downtown theatre company’s current production offers a bit of closure. After introducing DC audiences to a complicated young couple in Last Train to Nibroc in 2017, the Guild presented the follow up play See Rock City last year. Now May and Raleigh return for the Nibroc Trilogy’s final chapter, […]
Programs created in Tricia McCauley’s honor keep her memory alive
This holiday season is a time of celebration. It celebrates the possibility of hope, it celebrates redemption, it celebrates generosity of spirit, it celebrates the triumph of light over darkness. For many in our area, there is a sadness and a poignancy to the season as well. It was two years ago this Christmas that […]
Review: All Save One, a new comedy with a touch of Coward
It’s no shock that Hollywood is full of secrets. In the era of #MeToo, it’s clear that much is hidden from the public under a facade of glamour and glitz. Though it takes place during the 1950s, All Save One digs into what’s hidden through the comedic banter of its characters, exposing the pressures and […]
Review: Summerland, Civil War spirits or hoaxes
Washington Stage Guild’s Summerland serves up spirits from the next world but fails to make much of the play’s unusual post-Civil War subject and its fascinating antagonist. Shortly after the Civil War, America saw a revitalization of Spiritualism, the loosely defined belief that the spirits of the dead can be contacted by the living, especially with […]
Washington Stage Guild foregoes Shaw for a season of regional and world premieres
Washington Stage Guild, well known as the premier DC producer of the works of George Bernard Shaw, won’t be producing any of the master’s plays this year. Instead, it will serve up four contemporary plays about days gone by, including the concluding episode of Arlene Hutton’s Nibroc trilogy.