Any creative way that local companies find to bring us original theater feels like a lifeline these days, and We Happy Few’s genteel caper, Loveday Brooke in ‘The Mystery of the Drawn Daggers’, is no exception. Performed in the style of an old-fashioned radio play, the 45-minute mystery puts us in the hands of Loveday […]

All stories are about the loss of power – or, more correctly, loss of the illusion of power, and the more fundamental the loss, the more heart-wrenching the story. Here we are, in the prime of life, conquerors of the Peloton, with a swell job in the Department of Commerce and two kids in a […]

Halloween has a special resonance this year, as the horrors are close at hand, funerals are more numerous than weddings, and at times the whole world seems to be a sepulcher. In this context, horror from such specialists as Lovecraft and Poe serve, strangely, to comfort rather than to horrify (or to provoke graveyard laughter), […]

It amazes me how much the We Happy Few theatre company is able to accomplish through their signature, minimalist approach, and their production of Macbeth exemplifies this. With a cast of five portraying the play’s lofty number of characters in an intimate, black box setting, Macbeth is deliciously eerie. It’s a quick-paced version of The […]

One of my favorite things about any We Happy Few production is the vigor and joy with which the performers throw themselves into the work. The story, like Bram Stoker’s original Dracula, is told through a series of epistolary devices, primarily letters, with a good mix of telegrams and ships’ logs and the like. At […]

Darkness,  corpses, catacombs, and cats: welcome to the world of Edgar Allan Poe. His stories embody the spirit of Halloween, which is why it’s fitting that We Happy Few is performing his poetry and prose now.

We Happy Few specializes in bringing classical plays to life- and what better classic to choose this Halloween season than Mary Shelley’s Gothic horror story, Frankenstein?

One block west of the main drag through Eastern Market, in the cozy Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, the aptly named troupe We Happy Few has an amusing, engaging winner of a show with their take on Shakespeare’s underappreciated action adventure comedy Pericles, Prince of Tyre.

Imagine if the comedy from a charismatic SNL sketch was intertwined with poignant writing from the Spanish Golden Age of theatre. The result: The Dog in the Manger. This sparky rendition of Lope De Vega’s 17th century play blends meta jokes, farce, and societal reflections to create a mixture of stimulative fun.