John Stoltenberg

An Update: Returning to Clandestine Arts’ ‘Bare: A Pop Opera’

An update: I went back to see Clandestine Arts’ production of Bare last night (Friday, January 27th) and found the show even more enjoyable than the first time. The quality of musical numbers and...

Magic Time! ‘Back to Methuselah’ at Washington Stage Guild (Article)

People rarely go to the theater anymore to know what a playwright thinks. We go to be entertained, we go to be moved, we go to be told stories, which might involve hearing what assorted characters...

Magic Time! A Hard Look at the Theme of Pornography in ‘Rapture, Blister, Burn’

I knew I would be bummed if I missed the Round House Theatre production of Gina Gionfriddo’s Rapture, Blister, Burn. Everything I read told me, “John, you gotta see this.” So when I caught its...

‘Bare: A Pop Opera’ at Clandestine Arts

A young new theater company called Clandestine Arts has come to town and marked its arrival by tackling the beautifully scored coming out musical Bare: A Pop Opera. With a spirited cast of 17 all...

‘The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek’ at The George Washington University’s Department of Theatre and Dance

There were many moments in Naomi Wallace’s The Trestle at Poe Lick Creek, as interpreted by Director Jodi Kanter at The George Washington University’s Department of Theatre and Dance, when I inwardly...

Magic Time! A Look at ‘Cherokee’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (Article)

The connectivity crew at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company creates some of the most imaginative audience-engagement gimmicks in town. Typically tied to, and expressive of, the themes inside a play, these...

‘Fires in the Mirror’ at Howard University

Anna Deavere Smith’s classic Fires in the Mirror is getting a fascinating production this weekend by a very talented ensemble of student actors at Howard University. And on two counts this iteration...

How the Writer of ‘Life Sucks’ Reimagined the Women of ‘Uncle Vanya’: A Q&A with Aaron Posner, Judith Ingber, and Monica West

John Stoltenberg: It’s great that Molly Smith, artistic director of Arena Stage, and Eric Schaeffer, artistic director of Signature Theater, have initiated what will become the Women’s Voices Theater...

‘The Lieutenant of Inishmore’ at Constellation Theatre Company

Martin McDonagh is one of my favorite living playwrights, and I’ve loved his black comedy The Lieutenant of Inishmore every time I’ve seen it. So for me the Constellation Theatre Company production...

Magic Time! Look Who ♥s ‘The Vagina Monologues’

Each year at Valentine’s Day time, thousands of college and community groups around the world present staged readings and productions of The Vagina Monologues, by Tony Award–winning playwright Eve...

‘Half Life (a zombie letter for no one)’ at Mead Theatre Lab

“I’m not dead, I’m just hurt real bad,” says Regina, a young woman whose life is a painful wreck, a sorry mess. She’s homeless, rejected and shut out, even by her mother. She is an outsider so alien...

‘Out of Silence: Abortion Stories from the 1 in 3 Campaign’

No girl grows up dreaming of terminating a pregnancy. There are plenty of aspirational fantasies out there—some good for her, some not—but to be in a situation where she decides to have an abortion is...

‘Life Sucks (Or the Present Ridiculous)’ at Theater J

An intriguing question runs through Life Sucks (Or the Present Ridiculous), which is whether in fact life sucks or not. Is life inherently such a bummer that there’s no point going on? Or is life...

Magic Time! ‘Choirboy’ at The Studio Theatre

There comes a scene in Choir Boy at The Studio Theatre when five young black men stand naked in dimly lit separate shower stalls singing “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” in glorious harmony....

Magic Time!: ‘The T Party’ at Forum Theatre

Natsu Onoda Power’s delightfully devised theater piece The T Party could not have a more perfect home than Michael Dove’s quintessentially inclusive Forum Theatre. At Forum every walk-up ticket is Pay...

‘The Imperative to Reconcile’: A Conversation with Ari Roth by John Stoltenberg

In the week following Ari Roth’s firing as Artistic Director of Theater J, I talked with him about his vision of theater. It was a topic that mattered to me personally, because I had come to a deep...

Magic Time! ‘Terminus’ at The Studio Theatre

Graphic language can slam us and disturb us in a way that is unique to live theater. Visceral and muscular diction in performance can burn images into our mind’s eye as no cinema can.The power of...

‘The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures’ at Theater J

This is a big play,” the playwright Tony Kushner has said without understatement, and without an argument from anyone. It’s sprawling and sweeping and awesome in depth and breadth. It’s also long,...

‘Love Stinks!’ at The Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC

Love and song go together so well they’re a compound noun. Who doesn’t love a love song? But what about love that is disappointing, unreciprocated, wounding—all the loves that dare not speak their...

Hit Musical ‘Visible Language’ to Livestream on HowlRound Tomorrow, November 16th at 2 PM

Hit Musical Visible Language to Livestream on HowlRound TOMORROW, NOVEMBER 16, 2014 AT 2 PM WSC Avant Bard and the Gallaudet University Theatre and Dance Program announce today that their...

Magic Time! Heard About the Rainbow Theatre Project? A Q&A With Artistic Director H. Lee Gable

The Rainbow Theatre Project, Metro DC’s very own LGBTQ theatre company, has just begun its second season. If that sounds intriguing but you’ve never heard of it, small wonder. As H. Lee Gable,...

‘Bad Jews’ at The Studio Theatre

Bad Jews beggars genre naming. “Comedy of ideas” doesn’t hold a Shabbat candle to it. Bad Jews is so over-the-top funny, so razor-sharp smart, and so plumb-the-depths profound that it left me...

‘Pen’ at Washington Stage Guild

Washington Stage Guild starts off its 29th season with a smart production of David Marshall Grant’s Pen, a curious play that is by turns provocative and perplexing. The company’s tagline, aptly, is...

‘Not Enuf Lifetimes’ at The Welders at Atlas Performing Arts Center

There is a shortlist of great American plays about hopes and dreams, wrenching and emotionally exacting dramas exposing the anguish when righteous aspiration is tragically not enough. Arthur Miller’s...

Magic Time!: ‘Someone Is Going to Come’ (a workshop production) at Scena Theatre

This is what Jon Fosse’s words sound like. When he writes it sounds like this. His characters talk in short statements. They talk and they seem to say something ordinary. They seem to. One will say...

Magic Time: ‘Toast’ at dog & ponydc

I last partook of this tasty audience-integration treat from dog&pony dc last December when I saw Toast as a workshop production in the Kogod Cradle Series. The immersive experience was all about...

Magic Time! A Conversation With ‘Yentl’ Playwright Leah Napolin

Leah Napolin’s Yentl would have to be on any short list of best plays about religion and gender—and the production now at Theater J would have to be among its finest incarnations. Based on “Yentl the...

Magic Time! ‘Metamorphosis’ at Alliance for New Music-Theatre

As a short story by Franz Kafka awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, it found itself onstage transformed into a live action graphic novel. Wait, what? Translation: The adventurous Alliance for New...

Magic Time: ‘Belleville’ at The Studio Theatre

I’ve been crazy about Amy Herzog’s writing since I saw 4000 Miles last year at Studio Theatre. When I saw After the Revolution at Theater J last season, I just flipped. Herzog is, as I said then, on...

‘Yentl’ at Theater J

In Theater J’s beautiful, eloquent, and thrilling new production of Yentl, such profound new life has been breathed into Isaac Bashevis Singer’s beloved novella that at its heart this retelling is...

A Report From Page-to-Stage: ‘Hand Jobs’

The distinctive work of playwright Alan Sharpe returned to the Page-to-Stage Festival Saturday night with a reading of six short plays collectively titled Hand Jobs, presented by the African-American...

A Report From Page-to-Stage: ‘Carved in Stone’

After the entertaining staged reading at last year’s Page-to-Stage Festival of Mario Baldessari’s comedy The Good Devil, In Spite of Himself (coauthored with Tyler Herman), I called it in my report “a...

Magic Time! Free for All at Shakespeare Theatre Company: ‘The Winter’s Tale’

William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is a play I’d never seen or read or even known a thing about. So the experience of discovering it via The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s smashingly good...

‘1814! The War of 1812 Rock Opera’ at Silver Spring Black Box Theatre

What a kick to see this Capital Fringe hit back at it, better and badder. When 1814! The War of 1812 Rock Opera tore up the sweltering Baldacchino Tent in the summer of 2013, DCMetroTheaterArt’s...

‘Pol Pot & Associates, LLP’ at Longacre Lea

This is a cunning conundrum of a play. It moves back and forth in time, sudden lighting changes signal shifts from realistic to magical, the characters speak like superliterate savants, one-line...

Is ‘The Laramie Project’ a Convenient Untruth?

A new book about the Matthew Shepard murder challenges the theater community to reevaluate a cherished play. By JOHN STOLTENBERG

Cirque du Soleil’s ‘Amaluna’ at National Harbor

Ardent fans of Cirque du Soleil attending the spectacular new Amaluna will recognize this as one of Cirque’s best tent shows ever. Now in its 30th year with a track record of more than two dozen...

‘Gidion’s Knot’ at Forum Theatre

At the core of this inexorable and engrossing drama by Johnna Adams is a disturbing enigma: A fifth-grade boy named Gidion, suspended from school under suspicious circumstances, has shot himself in...

Capital Fringe 2014 Review: ‘The Other Day’

About an hour into The Other Day as performed at The Shop, a Dutch airport clerk named Steven (played by a very dashing Dash King), shows a young American named Mark (a puppy-dog-sweet Matthew...

Capital Fringe 2014 Review: ‘Porch’

(Best of the Capital Fringe) What a pleasure to happen upon this gem of a show. Featuring three exceptionally truthful and touching performances on a plain platform with next-to-no production values...

Capital Fringe 2014 Review: ‘Giant Box of Porn’

(Best of the Capital Fringe) Giant Box of Porn opened in the big Warehouse black box before a standing-room-only audience Saturday, and once the show got going I knew why: This humdinger is going to...

Capital Fringe 2014 Review: ‘Malevolence’

King’s Players, a young company in DC, named after Artistic Director and Founder Timothy R. King, has presented well-received original shows at the last two Capital Fringe festivals. Its 2014 offering...

Capital Fringe 2014 Review: ‘Writing Miss Clark’s Résumé’

In cases of sexual contact between teachers and minor students, the perpetrator is usually assumed to be male. But there are cases of such inappropriate and criminal behavior by female teachers...

Capital Fringe 2014 Review ‘As We Are’

(Best of the Capital Fringe) A widowed father in his late 50s lies in bed on a morphine drip, his body rife with cancer. Beside him is his thirty-something gay son, who has traveled to his childhood...

Capital Fringe 2014 Review: ‘Olizzia’

(Best of the Capital Fringe) First-time playwright John Bavoso’s inventive and appealing script for Olizzia would make a terrific indie rom-com caper that would be a hit on the lesbian-and-gay film...

Capital Fringe 2014 Review: ‘Rock Bottom [A Rock Opus]’

(Best of the Capital Fringe) If one way to tell whether a rock musical is really good is that it makes you want to come back and see it again, The Landless Theatre Company’s Rock Bottom [A Rock Opus]...

Magic Time! ‘Rodney King’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

If ever there was an Inadvertent American Hero, it’s Rodney King, the black construction worker whose brutal beating in 1991 by white cops in LA, caught on videotape, appalled the world, indicted a...

Magic Time! DC Black Theatre Festival: ‘The Laundry Room’

The DC Black Theatre Festival this year offered some 45 self-produced shows, most one time only. Organized annually by the DC Drama Department, a nonprofit educational theater company, the festival...

Magic Time! DC Black Theatre Festival: ‘7 Layers Captive’

The DC Black Theatre Festival this year offered some 45 self-produced shows, most one time only. Organized annually by the DC Drama Department, a nonprofit educational theater company, the festival...

DC Black Theatre Festival: ‘Somethin’ Like Eatonville’

The DC Black Theatre Festival, which runs through June 26, this year offers some 45 self-produced shows, most one time only. Organized annually by the DC Drama Department, a nonprofit educational...