Beatrice Loayza

Despite killer performances, ‘Shipwreck’s’ political message falters

Shipwreck: A History Play About 2017, the new play by Anne Washburn in its US premiere at Woolly Mammoth Theater Company, summons the dread and dysphoria of primarily white liberals following the 2016...

Shakespeare Theater Company’s ‘Everybody’ flirts with death, but falls short of greatness

There’s really only one thing that all of us – that everybody – has in common. Death, whether we’re ready or not, will come for us. All our failures and triumphs, our relationships and desires, can...

‘The 39 Steps’ by the St. Mark’s Players is a delightfully crafty, if uneven production

First things first for those expecting an honest adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 spy thriller of the same name. This latest production by the St. Mark’s Players might benefit from a...

Review: ‘Describe the Night’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Like Marcel Proust’s famous “madeleine moment,” Rajiv Joseph’s ambitious new play Describe the Night, in an exciting, Kafkaesque rendering by Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, finds philosophical...

Review: ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ at Silver Spring Stage

For a play so interested in the parameters of boredom endured by English high society, Silver Spring Stage’s rollicking production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is anything but...

Review: ‘The White Snake’ by Constellation Theatre Company

Trained in the mystical arts, two snakes, one white and one green (puppeteered and acted by Eunice Bae and Momo Nakamura, respectively) look longingly down from their mountain top at the hustle and...

Review: ‘In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play’ at Silver Spring Stage

When I think of how the scientific community has historically addressed the scourge of feminine hysteria, I tend to think of electro-shock treatments – those relics of masculine control over the...

Review: ‘The Master and Margarita’ at Constellation Theatre

The devil figure masquerading as Woland, the professor of black magic, in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita loathes skeptics, so much so that he travels around the world with the intention...

Review: ‘The Baltimore Waltz’ at the Keegan Theatre

Anna always wanted to go to Europe. See the City of Lights. Drink a pint of authentic German beer. Have a rendezvous (or two, or five) with strange men who whisper unintelligible sweet nothings into...

Review: ‘Admissions’ at Studio Theatre

It’s an odd thing, as a Latina here in Washington, D.C., to observe the mental wrestlings of liberal white folks struggling to come to terms with their privilege. How in muted voices they make sure to...

Review: ‘She The People’ at the Second City at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

It’s common knowledge that the female cast members of Saturday Night Live like Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones practically run the high-profile comedy sketch show. The myth that women cannot be funny...

Review: ‘The Fever’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Audience participation can so often be a painful and unwelcome component of a night at the theater, especially if, like myself, you’re prone to minor panic attacks at the thought of being randomly...

Review: ‘Actually’ by Theater J at Arena Stage

The idea of sexual consent might seem simple: no means stop and yes means carry on. In practice, however, nothing could be further from the truth. The predicaments stemming from this issue that so...

Review: ‘Figaro in Four Quartets’ by the In Series

From behind tall blank panels, a cast of characters drawn from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro emerge, dressed in all white period garb, staging vignettes of frustrated and consummated love punctuated...

Review: ‘The Philadelphia Story’ at St. Mark’s Players

Philadelphia 1939. The Great Depression is nearly over and the United States is on the brink of war. Sent out by a gossip weekly to cover the wedding of socialite Tracy Lord (Lauren Devoll), reporter...

Review: ‘The Last American Hammer’ by UrbanArias

Stick a right-wing conspiracy theorist, a curator at a Toby jug museum, and a rookie FBI agent in the same porcelain-filled room in a no-name town in rural Ohio, then make them talk over tea and...

Review: ‘The Events’ by Theater Alliance at the Anacostia Playhouse

A wrenching agitation pervades the gray clouded confines of The Events, in which a diverse chorus group is slaughtered by a gunman. Claire (Regina Aquino), the church chorus leader, is the sole...

Review: ‘Turn Me Loose’ at Arena Stage

Long before Hannah Gadsby premiered her anti-comedy stand-up special Nanette, in which she lambasts the sexist entertainment industry and forces audiences to reckon with their own complicity, there...

Review: ‘Romeo and Juliet’ at Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Free For All

Romeo & Juliet’s famous entreaty–“wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast”– is strikingly realized in the latest addition to Shakespeare Theatre Company’s yearly Free For All production, a...

Review: ‘Don Cristóbal’ at Pointless Theatre

Co-directors Rachel Menyuk and Eric Swartz have brought to the DC stage a truly original work with Don Cristóbal, Pointless Theatre’s last show of the 2017-2018 season. At first an obscene and...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘The Country Co-ed’

If you’re a fan of double entendres and early-2000s raunchy teen movies, then chances are you’ll like The Country Co-ed, a modern re-imagining of William Wycherley’s 17th-century Restoration comedy,...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Blowin’ Off Steam’

Written and directed by Chuck DeLong, Blowin’ Off Steam takes you bench-side into the steam room of a men’s fitness club in the suburbs of New York City, where seven painfully straight men spend their...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: “50 Ways…”

A woman (IO Browne) climbs out of bed, her lover still fast asleep, unmoved. She lays out on the floor, limber and sensual as she dances like a flower budding through a crack in the pavement. Another...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Horse People’

By Beatrice Loayza Watching Lindsey Griffith’s one-woman performance Horse People, I can’t help but feel as if I’ve stumbled into a dream. Papier-mâché horse heads, large overhead projections,...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Vengeance in My Heart’

By Beatrice Loayza Titus Andronicus is the little-known Shakespeare tragedy most reminiscent of a Quentin Tarantino film. Bloody murder, sex, and violence galore, Andronicus is historically a work...

Review: ‘The House of Blue Leaves’ at Silver Spring Stage

First staged in 1971, The House of Blue Leaves is a descendant of the kitchen sink dramas and average joe tragedies that marked the American and British theater scenes in the turbulent decade...

Review: ‘Damned If You Do’ by Upright Citizens Brigade at Woolly Mammoth

By Beatrice Loayza “So, what are we seeing again?” my friend asks me at dinner prior to the show. Pause. I scrape the corners of my mind for a suitable answer, but the reality is– “I have no clue.”...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘The City Of…’

By Beatrice Loayza Directed by Patrick Pearson and written by Matthew Capodicasa, The City Of . . . is an ambitious work self-described as inspired by the metaphysical wrestlings of Jorge Luis Borges,...