John Stoltenberg

Magic Time!: ‘Safeguards’ by Brave Soul Collective at Anacostia Arts Center

Brave Soul Collective is a hidden gem of theatrical truthtelling about black men who are LGBTQ. Periodically the collective surfaces with a one-night-only showcase of work by local writing and...

Magic Time!: ‘How to Win a Race War’ at The Klunch

I know from my feminist antipornography activism that there is plenty of misogynist hate literature around. (The hard-core stuff is brutal, sadistic propaganda marketed to men arousing them to violate...

Magic Time!: ‘The Events’ at Theater Alliance

Theater Alliance’s The Events, now playing at Anacostia Playhouse, is one of several plays this season that deal with a mass shooting. (There’s also Pinky Swear’s Blight, coming October 20 to the same...

Magic Time!: ‘If I Forget’ at Studio Theatre

To paraphrase the famous Passover Seder line, “Why is this domestic drama different from all other domestic dramas?” Or, to put the impudent question another way, “What makes If I Forget a uniquely...

Magic Time!: ‘Gloria’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Count on Branden Jacobs-Jenkins to leave you whiplashed and shell-shocked. He hits nerve after nerve then goes for the jugular. Whatever he writes, see it. Woolly’s previous productions of...

Page to Stage 2018: Tastings from a Buffet (Part Two)

Kennedy Center’s annual Page to Stage Festival is always chock full of tempting offerings, and the challenge of deciding what to see is daunting. It’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet…except you really...

Review: ‘Small Mouth Sounds’ at Round House Theatre

“You have everything you need within you to be human,” says an unseen guru on the god mic. He is speaking in sonorous tones to six seekers who now sit rapt in a row facing us the audience. They have...

Page to Stage 2018: Tastings from a Buffet (Part One)

Kennedy Center’s annual Page to Stage Festival is always chock full of tempting offerings, and the challenge of deciding what to see is daunting. It’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet…except you really...

Review: ‘Marie and Rosetta’ at Mosaic Theater Company

I could well make this a one-word review: Wow. After the sensational opening of Marie and Rosetta at Mosaic last night, wow was the first word I heard from everyone I talked to, and wow was the first...

Magic Time!: ‘The Interstellar Ghost Hour’ at Longacre Lea

Here’s an idea for a grad lit student in search of a dissertation topic: “Bewilderment and Brilliance in the Theater of Kathleen Akerley.” That thought flipped through my head after I watched The...

Review: ‘In the Closet’ at Rainbow Theatre Project

“It gets better” is the premise and promise of a multimedia campaign that since 2010 has tried to offer hope and encouragement to LGBTQ+ youth. The message can be life-saving. Nearly all such youth at...

Review: ‘Happy Ending’ at Anacostia Playhouse

Happy Ending is a one-act satirical comedy written in the 1960s by Douglas Turner Ward, co-founder of the Negro Ensemble Company. He had written an op-ed for the New York Times called “American...

Magic Time!: ‘The Story of the Gun’ at Woolly Mammoth

Mike Daisey’s monolog The Story of the Gun is a show both hilarious and sobering, and he begins it with a wry riff on who we are who have come to see it. As he joshingly reminds us, we are liberal...

Magic Time!: ‘Dave’ at Arena Stage

You know those big live TV versions of blockbuster musicals that get broadcast decades after the show was a hit on the stage? Like, not until generations have come and gone? Well in the case of Dave,...

Magic Time!: A Report on ‘The Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company’

The prodigiously imaginative performance artist Holly Bass belongs to the first generation of her family not to pick cotton for a living. I learned that startling fact as I passed through an art...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Perfecting the Kiss’

This comedy about bad theater and inappropriate backstage behavior is just gobsmacking good. Laugh-a-minute is an underestimation. Don’t miss it. Perfecting the Kiss, a production from New York...

Magic Time!: Mike Daisey Takes Aim at ‘The Story of the Gun’ in America

Masterful monologuist Mike Daisey returns to DC to skewer with humor another burning issue of the day. This time it’s America’s thing about guns. What’s that all about, anyway? How did guns get to be...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Almost Full: A Young Woman’s Guide to Growing Up’

On July 6, 2018, six girls ages 13 to 17 came together and began composing poetry and choreography and a little music about their just-starting-out lives. Two weeks later they performed the 29 short...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Shopworn’

Race relations in the Deep South might not leap to mind as a promising topic for a laugh-out-loud comedy. But in Shopworn, premiering at Fringe, Playwright-Producer Derek Hills (who is white) has...

Magic Time!: ‘O Monsters’ at Capital Fringe and the Limits of Criticism

I went to see O Monsters, the radically abstract production created by Philadelphia’s New Paradise Laboratories, now playing in the Kogod Cradle at Arena as one of five curated productions in 2018...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Dragon Hunting Support Group’

The theater students at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, MD, are a plucky bunch. When the school had no funds for production, they organized as a club and got a budget from the Student...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Spook’

Actor-Writer-Revolutionary Meshaun Labrone has done it again. Two years ago he brought back Power! to Fringe. That drama about Stokely Carmichael I called “one of the best-written, best-acted, and...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Hexagon 2018: Tweet Land of Liberty’

The all-volunteer organization Hexagon, “DC’s only original political satirical musical comedy troupe,” has been around since 1955 and has long been a Fringe fan fave. Its signature productions are...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Sobriety of Fear’

Count Shaun Michael Johnson among the stunning new talents to be discovered at Capital Fringe. His solo show, Sobriety of Fear, is a tour-de-force of empathic acting. With breathtaking emotional...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Barococo’

Happenstance Theater, the much-lauded purveyors of cheekily sophisticated whimsy, have brought another original devised work to Fringe, and if it doesn’t tickle your funny bone, you might want to have...

Review: ‘People for Whom the World Spins and Turns’ at The Essential Theatre

The boarding house play is a staple in theater. Assorted folks who might otherwise never cross paths are thrown together by a playwright who then grips us with their backstories, intertwined character...

Magic Time!: ‘East of the River’ at Anacostia Musical Theatre Lab

Community engagement is a noble aspiration for a lot of theaters around town. The challenge is to make theater matter to folks who live in the nabe. To connect the institution to the community, to be...

Magic Time!: ‘The Till Trilogy’ at Mosaic Theater Company

The murderous race hate that killed young Emmett Till in 1955 is alive and well. The impunity with which white assailants get away with it is still much with us. And the irony is that the iconic...

Love and Friendship IRL: A Q&A With Brandon McCoy and Brianna Letourneau About ‘Other Life Forms’ at Keegan Theatre

I went to see Other Life Forms, the new comedy at Keegan Theatre, not expecting to write about it. But the play changed my mind. I wasn’t even home yet when on an impulse I tweeted that Other Life...

Is DC Theater Getting Addicted to Trump?

Post-Play Palaver is an occasional series of conversations between DC Theater Arts writers. In this one, Senior Writers and Columnists John Stoltenberg (Magic Time!) and David Siegel (In the Moment)...

Magic Time!: ‘The Emperor of Atlantis’ at The In Series

The Emperor of Atlantis—an operatic takedown of autocracy—is relevant to our times in freaky and haunting ways. And its backstory is chilling. Near the end of World War II, the Czech composer Victor...

Review: ‘Switch’ at The Welders

The gender-flip trope has been a staple on stage for much of theater history, and just when you thought it had been trotted out every which way imaginable, along comes a delightful surprise. Brett...

Review: ‘The Vagrant Trilogy’ at Mosaic Theater Company

The vagrant of the title is a Palestinian scholar named Adham who, while on a trip to London as a grad student, must decide, when war breaks out in his homeland, whether to stay or go. Will he remain...

“The Queerest Role I’ve Played”: A Q&A with Jon Hudson Odom About ‘Botticelli in the Fire’ at Woolly Mammoth

Jon Hudson Odom’s performance in Jordan Tannahill’s new play Botticelli in the Fire just blew me away. And it wasn’t the first time that had happened. I’ve been following his work for several years,...

Review: ‘TransAmerica’ at Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC

At a historical moment when appalling new waves of gender fundamentalism sweep our nation, leaving bigotry and violence in their wake, it was beyond refreshing to hear the Gay Men’s Chorus of...

Magic Time!: ‘The Scottsboro Boys’ at Signature Theatre

The musical The Scottsboro Boys tells a true story of heinous injustice driven by race hate, and the theatrical form is a minstrel show—bouyant upbeat dancing, rousing melodic singing, and buffoonish...

Magic Time!: ‘The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs’ at Spooky Action Theatre

The mystery at the center of this adroit drama keeps getting mysteriouser and mysteriouser: What’s in the small room at the top of the stairs? Playwright Carole Fréchette has crafted a cagey...

Magic Time!: ‘Republic Undone’ at The Metropolitan Club

Going back to Ancient Greece, theater has functioned as a forum for informed public debate—about war, religion, politics, all the issues relevant to the citizenry of the day. The Greeks had a word for...

Magic Time!: ’10 Million’ and ‘The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant’ at The Kennedy Center

Among the rich offerings in The Kennedy Center’s Artes de Cuba festival were two extraordinary works of theater, each performed but twice: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, from Teatro El Público,...

Review: ‘The Remains’ at Studio Theatre

They have such a tasteful, immaculate, picture-perfect kitchen, how could their marriage be such a sorry mess? That’s a crass way to ask the question, but the answers are beautifully nuanced in Ken...

Review: ‘Flood City’ at Theater Alliance

I would not have thought that a play about dreadful disaster could be done as a droll and delightfully dark comedy, but Playwright Gabrielle Reisman did. Having lived through Hurricane Katrina in 2005...

Review: ‘The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant’ at The Kennedy Center

Obsessional unrequited love is what prompts Petra von Kant’s bitter tears in the 1972 German film by Rainier Werner Fassbinder. The movie is a languid immersion in the self-absorption of a...

Magic Time!: ‘The Frederick Douglass Project’ by Solas Nua

In a tent pitched on a pier overlooking the Anacostia River, there is a powerfully important work of theater being performed. The work is The Frederick Douglass Project, commissioned to commemorate...

Review: ‘Burst’ at Parlor Room Theater

The sudden incapacity of their mother is the occasion for three siblings and their cousin to gather at a Boston hospital in Amy Leigh Horan’s touching and perceptive new family dramedy Burst, just...

Review: ‘The Undeniable Sound of Right Now’ at The Keegan Theatre

If KISS were starting out today, they’d be trying to get noticed on a streaming music site like Spotify. And followers would find their tour dates on apps like Bandsintown. Or maybe the masked marvels...

Review: ‘Iron & Coal’ at Strathmore

The sheer magnitude of the concert event was enough to inspire wonder and awe. More than 200 musicians packed the Strathmore stage and a balcony above—two orchestras, three choirs, a rock band—plus...

Review: ‘Vietgone’ at Studio Theatre

There is so much in this show to flip over, you could be dizzied by its delights. The fantastical story and kooky characters, the wicked humor and badass music, the frisky cast and musicians, the...

Review: ‘Girlfriend’ at Signature Theatre

The rock musical Girlfriend celebrates the tentativeness and exuberance of a budding romance between two gay teens in a small town Nebraska in the 1990s. Just after graduating from high school, Will,...

Review: ‘Amanuensis’ at Georgetown University

Time has not been kind to Great Dead White Male Artists, poor things. Nosey feminist historians have been poking around in these guys lives and digging up dirt about how they treated women! And now...

Review: ‘After the Rehearsal’ and ‘Persona’ at The Kennedy Center

Back in college in Minnesota, I was so into the forlorn films of Ingmar Bergman that I think he affected my mental health. I could relate to his bleak Nordic worldview, which I associated with long...