We can’t tell you much about 600 Highwaymen’s new show, The Fever, without spoiling the experience. Woolly Mammoth Theatre cryptically calls it a “spellbinding examination of how we assemble, organize, and care for the bodies around us,” performed “in complete elaboration with the audience” that “tests the limits of individual and collective responsibility and our […]
Review: Gloria, a very Woolly play – “sometimes shocking, frequently hilarious”
While a very popular musical currently running at the Kennedy Center is asking audiences, “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” across town at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’ Gloria is positing different, and perhaps timelier, questions: “Who owns a tragedy? And how much can you get for it?”
Review: The Story of the Gun by Mike Daisey
What do you get when you take one of America’s most controversial theatre artists and its most divisive political issue and put them in a room together in our nation’s capital? In the case of Mike Daisey’s The Story of the Gun, on stage now at Woolly Mammoth for a limited run, you get a […]
Review: Damned If You Do. The women of UCB prove there’s hope for DC after all.
To put on a fresh show every night, Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB) must know its audience down to the core of their prides and insecurities. The New York- and Los Angeles-based improv comedy troupe, co-founded by Amy Poehler, read D.C. like a book on press night.
Celebrating Shalwitz: report from the scene Monday night for the One and Only Howard Shalwitz
From the theater that prodded, poked, and provoked for nigh on forty years rose the unlikeliest of DC’s hallowed institutions and its leader – Howard Shalwitz. Many from the Woolly Mammoth herd gathered together Monday night to pay tribute to the man. The occasion of Shalwitz’ announced retirement had sparked the altogether curious affair. Though […]
Review: Botticelli in the Fire, an explosive queer comedy set in 15th century Italy
Fans of Jordan Tannahill’s work, including his 2015 book Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama—a screed against the ubiquity of the well-made play and the modern theatre’s propensity to workshop the risk of failure out of every script—know better than to walk into Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company’s U.S. premiere production of Botticelli […]
Woolly Mammoth announces its 2018/2019 season
Maria Manuela Goyanes will take over as Woolly Mammoth’s new Artistic Director next season, and her first season itself will be full of familiar Woolly friends — Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Rajiv Joseph, The Upright Citizens Brigade, Mike Daisey, and the Second City.
Review: The Underground Railroad Game. Uncomfortable? Yes. Cringe-worthy? Yes.
The title alone – The Underground Railroad Game – gives you hint of the slippery slide towards impropriety and breach of all kinds of correctness about to happen. And that’s not even the half of it.
Maria Manuela Goyanes to step into the role of Woolly Mammoth Artistic Director next fall
Maria Manuela Goyanes, The Public Theater’s Director of Producing and Artistic Planning, will be the new Artistic Director of Woolly Mammoth Theater, the company announced today.
Cliff Williams III: Why theatres need to hire intimacy choreographers.
The theatre can be a messy place, and often this is most evident in the rehearsal process. Violence and intimacy scenes stand as two of the more interesting challenges. How do we display violence on stage, while keeping the actors safe? How can an actor sit there and take a punch every night, for 20+ performances, […]
Danai Gurira’s comedy Familiar at Woolly Mammoth Theatre (review)
Familiar, by Tony Award winning playwright Danai Gurira, is an intimate comedy-drama set in the home of a first-generation Zimbabwean family living in Minnesota. The family has gathered over the weekend to celebrate and prepare for the winter wedding of their eldest daughter, Tendi (Sharina Martin) to Chris, her white fiancé, (Drew Kopas). Audiences engage with the […]
Big changes coming to theatres in 2018
The greatest sign of stability in a culture is, paradoxically, its ability to absorb change. There was a collective holding of breath when Joy Zinoman announced her retirement in 2009; could Studio stand the absence of its only Artistic Director? We needn’t have worried. Studio’s fine, and so are we.