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There’s something powerful about the straightforward, the clear and articulate, the simple—particularly in this age where we, though interested in the historical and the “antiquarian,“ rarely consider the artifact as it is. With Gilgamesh, Constellation Theatre’s world premiere production of the world’s oldest tale, poet Yusef Komunyakaa’s beautiful pitch-perfect text and dramatist Chad Gracia’s structurally edifying frame take [...]
Synetic Theater, that theatre best known for its “wordless” Shakespeares, or wordless Jekyll & Hydes—or wordless “anything”—has decided to speak in its new production of Alexander Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. Then again, what Synetic is also known for is risk-taking (as if a theatre that offers an original production [adaptation] with each new show weren’t taking a huge [...]
“If music be the food of love, play on.” And if music be not the food? Play on anyway because Folger Theatre’s production of Twelfth Night is nothing short of a feast of delightful visuals and characters, moments of kindness and devilish high jinx, sounds of the bawdy and faces from just this side of madness. In other words, [...]
I was first introduced to Harold Pinter in 1975 by way of The Birthday Party and its mysterious brutality. Having seen, acted in, and directed many of his works since then, I have only grown in my admiration of the unique manner in which this master playwright synthesizes the linguistically brilliant with the visceral, creating worlds that [...]
As a title, Pas de Deux, with its connotations of ballet and romantic refinement, might be a bit misleading. With Skin Tight by New Zealander Gary Henderson and 2-2 Tango by Canadian Daniel MacIivor, we definitely have dancing, but of the psycho-sexual variety. And we have lots of romance, both the longterm and enduring and the flash-in-the-pan-and-smash-that-watermelon-to-bits kind. [...]
If I were to tell you that The Personal(s), now playing at the No Rules Theatre Company in residence at Signature Theatre, was about a married couple who, after the death of their daughter in a horrible car wreck, struggles to save their marriage through a series of role-playing “blind dates,” you might say: “That play [...]
When you enter the world of The Amazing and Marvelous Cabinets of Kismet be prepared to free yourself from expectation. To be sure, you will find puppets within the Mead Theatre Lab, but do not expect any Pinocchios or Punches or Judys to spring into being. These puppets are of a wholly different order. The puppets of Kismet are [...]
Catholic University’s current production of Ken Ludwig’s Shakespeare in Hollywood is a high spirited and broadly comic take of Max Reinhardt’s time in Hollywood in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War II. The play is based on a historical event. The famous German director Reinhardt comes to Hollywood to direct his version of Shakespeare’s A [...]
Now playing at Shakespeare Theatre’s Harman Hall is Wallenstein—and no, that’s not a live version of the award winning strategy board game published by Queen Games—but rather Friedrich Schiller’s 10-act trilogy—and no, it’s not as monstrous as those 10 acts sound—for SCT commissioned former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky to translate, freely adapted, and modernize the Schiller’s [...]
Let me begin this review with a declaration. I really enjoyed the Shakespeare Theatre’s production of Shakespeare’s tragedy Coriolanus. Although I left the theatre wishing that more had been made of the last couple of minutes—so ripe yet not plucked—I found the production’s big bass drums and mind-tingling percussions, its over-the-top Caius Martius and its delightful [...]
With Taffety Punk’s newest performance piece, Oxygen by Russian playwright/filmmaker Ivan Vyrypaev, one might be tempted to surrender to its stream-of-consciousness prose, to its in-your-face provocations on sex and violence, to its convoluted I-dare-you-to-define-who-and-what-I-am style. Then I, being old and grizzled, could easily claim I just cannot understand kids today, particularly sensibilities from Moscow and its 21st [...]
Silver Spring Stage’s production of Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon proves many things. In this age of cinema and its digital, computerized moving images, nothing beats a stage play as a vehicle of historical transport. In this land of dozens of multi-million dollar professional theatre complexes with their “seemingly” unlimited budgets for paraphernalia and extreme sets, nothing beats a stage [...]
Happenstance Theater’s Vanitas seeks—as its co-founder Mark Jaster writes—“to render the imagery and form of a ‘Vanitas’ still life painting in a work of ‘visual, poetic theatre.’” A vanitas painting refers specifically to the symbolic still lifes of 16th and 17th century Flanders and the Netherlands, but more broadly to those visual depictions of the medieval definition of vanity, [...]
American Utopias, Mike Daisey’s new monologue now playing at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, in one sense puts forward the following proposition: what if we were to remove the walls from the Woolly Mammoth building, taking away all the architecture that creates a private, exclusive, and safe space for performance, and make those artistic expressions of revolution [...]
