John Stoltenberg

Review: ‘The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington’ at Ally Theatre Company

“I do believe you darkies are trying to kill me,” says Martha Washington to her house slaves in this fantastical-historical play, just opened in a sensationally cheeky production at the new Ally...

Magic Time!: ‘Smart People’ at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater

Racism, presumed in polite circles to be no laughing matter, gets a hilariously smart deconstruction in Lydia R. Diamond’s Smart People. Arena Stage has given this 2016 play its DC premiere in a nifty...

Magic Time!: ‘Or,’ at Round House Theatre

As play titles go, Or, is one of the most ungoogleable. It is a search engine dead end. And as an original mashup of past and present, prose and poetry, and performative purposes, Liz Duffy Adams’s...

Magic Time!: ‘Off the Leash: A Journey Into Reality One Black Life at a Time’ at Woolly Mammoth Rehearsal Hall

After I watched eleven B.F.A. candidates in Howard University’s Class of 2017 perform a program of self-scripted audition pieces—character-rich monodramas, actually—I had one overwhelming urge: I...

Magic Time!: Homoeroticism and the Mother in ‘Blood Knot’: A Q&A with Director Joy Zinoman

Until I saw Blood Knot at Mosaic Theater Company, I knew the work of Director Joy Zinoman only by reputation. I had come to her legend late. And the production blew me away. Set in apartheid South...

News Release: DCMetroTheaterArts Is Here to Stay!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DCMetroTheaterArts Squelches Rumors of Closing, Announces Plan for Future Leadership and Growth Staff Rallies in Response to Founding Editor’s Diagnosis, Thanks Local Theater...

Review: ‘A Human Being Died That Night’ at Mosaic Theater Company of DC

There are moments in this gripping, challenging, and deeply thought-provoking drama when the smallest of gestures by the two actors say what the play is about more than words can. A Human Being Died...

Review: ‘In the Next Room or the vibrator play’ at Georgetown University

I lost count of how many orgasms are in this show. They keep, um, coming and coming. And each one is performed stunningly by a student actor with such precisely differentiated paroxysms and vivid...

Review: ‘Lucy’ at UrbanArias

As the PETA-hounded circus left town on its farewell tour, I headed to the Atlas Performing Center to see Lucy, an UrbanArias opera about an actual chimp. I was reassured to learn that no animals were...

Review: ‘Pike St.’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Even as fear and animus split the human race asunder, great authors have reminded us for millennia that we really are all one. From the ancient Roman playwright Terrence (“I am human, and nothing...

Review: ‘King Lear’ at George Washington University

Director Leslie Jacobson has book-ended Shakespeare’s dark tragedy King Lear with lyrical and lovingly-lit tableaux of the mad king’s court as if in a fairy-tale photo op—Lear regal on his throne, his...

Magic Time! ‘Dry Land’ & ‘What Every Girl Should Know’ at Forum Theatre

I’ve seen some harrowing-to-watch theater in my time, but I recall nothing as excruciating as a particular scene in Dry Land, now running at Forum Theatre. The play by Ruby Rae Spiegel is set in the...

Post-Play Palaver: ‘Three Sisters’ and ‘No Sisters’ at Studio Theatre

Post-Play Palaver is an occasional series of conversations between DCMetroTheaterArts writers who saw the same production—in this case the same two productions, Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Aaron...

Review: ‘Well’ at 1st Stage

“Social ills” is a term often used to name a problem without caring about the people affected by it—as in the phrase “racism and other social ills.” It’s a way of keeping one’s distance by making the...

Review: ‘Mnemonic’ at Theater Alliance

Just now when the world is wracked with wave upon wave of ethnic animus—just now when our country has succumbed to xenophobia not seen on these shores for decades—there comes a work of theatrical art...

Review: ‘No Sisters’ at The Studio Theatre

A shout-out to Studio Theatre co-founder Russell Metheny, who designed the complex on 14th Street, for installing a backstage stairway connecting the dressing rooms of the second-floor Milton and the...

Magic Time! ‘Needles and Opium’ at The Kennedy Center

When I left the Eisenhower Theater last night after witnessing this mesmerizing multimedia marvel, I had a quibble. I had just one, but it could be the most peculiar cavil I’ve ever had about a show....

Magic Time! ‘Intelligence’ at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater

Lately I’ve been thinking that there are two key questions that must be asked of every season-programming choice by every theater’s artistic director: 1) Why now? 2) So what? There is no single right...

Magic Time!: ‘The Select (The Sun Also Rises)’ at Shakespeare Theatre Company

F. Scott Fitzgerald was among the first to take an editorial whack at Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises (then called Fiesta). Among other things cut out by Fitzgerald was the entire...

The Subplot Quickens: A Q&A with Michelle Beck About Her Remarkable Role in ‘King Charles III’ at Shakespeare Theatre Company

I greatly admired both the writing and the acting in Shakespeare Theatre Company production of Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III, but to be honest it was the character of Jessica and Michelle Beck’s...

Magic Time!: ‘The How and the Why’ at Theater J

The very title poses a puzzle. How what? Why what? Yet the definite articles assert certitude. The what. The how. Turns out in this brainy play about two smart women, perplexity and uncertainty...

Review: ‘The Very Last Days of the First Colored Circus’ at Restoration Stage

A long-ago love story inspired this richly textured play with 1920s music. When Playwright Steven A. Butler Jr. was growing up, he heard family stories about how his great-great grandparents, Ruby...

Review: ‘The Freshest Snow Whyte’ at Imagination Stage

Far off the radar of most grownup theatergoers, the writer/director Psalmayene 24 has been creating an extraordinary body of work for children. I’ve been an admirer of the trenchant work he has...

Magic Time! ‘Watch on the Rhine’ at Arena Stage

Whatever this play meant to Broadway audiences when it debuted in 1941, just prior to America’s entry into a war of resistance to fascism abroad, what matters now is what it means to audiences just as...

Magic Time! ‘I Wanna Fucking Tear You Apart’ at Studio X

Friendships between fat girls and gay boys really are a thing, practically a cliché actually—or a trope, as Playwright Morgan Gould dignifies them when referring to just such a queer pairing in her...

Magic Time! ‘The River’ at Spooky Action Theater

A man has a remote rustic fishing cabin. There are lot of fish in the water nearby. He’s a rugged, outdoorsy guy and he loves to fish. In a Hemingway novel he would not be a fish out of water. This...

Review: ‘Hooded, Or Being Black for Dummies’ at Mosaic Theater Company of DC

There is a laugh track with this show. As in a prerecorded TV sitcom where the studio audience was cued to be amused, there’s an overhead LAUGH sign that flashes intermittently accompanied by canned...

Magic Time!’ ‘LIZZIE: The Musical’ at Pinky Swear Productions

Don’t groan but this is a bloody good show. It rocks, it roils, it’s saucy and sassy, it’s effin in-your-face. The story is gory as you might expect. It’s about the legendary 1892 axe murder of Lizzie...

Magic Time! ‘Silent Sky’ at Silver Spring Stage

Lately the news has been resignifying theater more than usual. To resignify is not a commonly used verb but it’s a commonly understood thing. It means “to give new signification to,” to alter what...

Review: ‘Roe’ at Arena Stage

The title of Lisa Loomer’s riveting play Roe refers to both the pivotal Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade and the person known as Jane Roe who was the plaintiff in it. Loomer dramatizes both stories—why...

Magic Time! ‘The Hard Problem’ at The Studio Theatre

I love when a play starts out as a fascinating head trip—a smart, high-concept exhilaration of ideas—then propels me headlong into an overwhelming flood of emotion. It’s like being transported along a...

Meet the Three Young Actors in ‘Watch on the Rhine’ at Arena Stage: #3 Lucy Breedlove

Lucy Breedlove makes her professional debut playing the middle of three siblings in Lillian Hellman’s 1941 play Watch on the Rhine. In the childhood they are having, the bogeyman is all too real. Set...

Review: ‘[gay] Cymbeline’ at Theatre Prometheus

Queering Shakespeare may be gilding the lily. And if so DC these days has seen quite a few such embellished flowers. Like, golden nosegays for days. One of the best and freshest in the bunch is...

Review: ‘Recent Tragic Events’ at St. Mark’s Players

The American theater has generated some great plays prompted by the tragic events of 9/11. I remember vividly Neil LaBute’s powerful 2002 drama The Mercy Seat, in a production LaBute directed...

Magic Time! ‘Someone Is Going to Come’ at Scena Theatre

Someone Is Going to Come is a comedy of menace with a roiling undercurrent of sexual tension. It evokes ominous noirish goings-on in a scary remote locale told in stark idiosyncratic dialogue. And...

Meet the Three Young Actors in ‘Watch on the Rhine’ at Arena Stage: #2 Tyler Bowman

Tyler Bowman makes his Arena Stage debut playing the youngest of three siblings in Lillian Hellman’s 1941 play Watch on the Rhine. The children have traveled with their mother and father to Georgetown...

‘Charm’ at Mosaic Theater Company of DC

Just opened at Mosaic Theater Company in a thrilling and vibrant production directed by Natsu Onoda Power is a play that puts on stage some of what National Geographic just called the gender...

Meet the Three Young Actors in ‘Watch on the Rhine’ at Arena Stage: #1 Ethan Miller

Ethan Miller makes his Arena Stage debut playing one of the three children in Lillian Hellman’s 1941 drama Watch on the Rhine. It’s not what you’d call a kid’s show. Set in 1940, the play echoes with...

Review: ‘Copenhagen’ at Theater J

Strange to watch a play unfold and wish that it did not feel so chillingly relevant. Or that the past it depicts never happened. Or that the moral and material uncertainty at its core did not portend...

Review: Step Afrika!’s Magical Musical Holiday Step Show

With the audience seated in the round on a floor shared by the playing space, you could feel the whole place shaking and quaking. It was no subterranean tremor; it was the ebullient Step Afrika!...

Magic Time! ‘The DOMA Diaries’ at The Rainbow Theatre Project

The year 2013, when the Supreme Court narrowly struck down the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional, has already faded from America’s short-term memory but not so much as has 1996, the year...

Magic Time! ‘Into the Woods’ at The Kennedy Center

The acclaimed Fiasco Theater production of Into the Woods has come to the Eisenhower Theater at Kennedy Center for the holidays—I am tempted to say for a spell, because the show is enchanting as a...

‘Magic Time!’ ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’ at The Folger Theatre

Watching the Folger Consort’s robust and warmhearted staging of this medieval mystery play, I was struck by how curiously it connects us today to the audiences who first saw it performed. Here we were...

Review #1:’Copenhagen’ at Perisphere Theater

The storytelling in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen—which won the 2000 Tony Award for Best Play—is ingeniously done. The play’s three characters are deceased. They are actual historical figures whom Frayn...

Magic Time! ‘Arguing with God’ at Woman’s National Democratic Club

Always on the lookout for provocative theater in improbable places, I went to the one-night-only DC premiere of a politically edgy and surprisingly funny send-up of Yahweh, the God of the Old...

Review: ‘Black Nativity’ at Theater Alliance

I saw Black Nativity last year at Anacostia Playhouse and was so thrilled by it (as I wrote in my rave review), I had to go again this year. I went expecting to see a reproduction of a splendid show...

Magic Time!: ‘The Christians’ at Theater J

A debate about the existence of hell is combusting in the nation’s preeminent Jewish theater. And that particular drama in that particular venue could not be more anomalous. There is in Judaism no...

Magic Time! ‘Straight White Men’ at The Studio Theatre

Playwright Young Jean Lee’s audacious title refers to the particular—the white widowed father (Ed) and his three grown sons (Drew, Jake, and Matt) who are on stage for most of this naturalistic...

Magic Time! ‘(Re)Acts: Where Do We Go From Here?’ at Forum Theatre

“We certainly didn’t prepare ourselves for this,” said Forum Theatre Artistic Director Michael Dove Monday night at the Silver Spring Black Box Theatre. He was addressing a packed house of folks who...

Magic Time: ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ at The Keegan Theatre

Having been watching a con man on the national stage for too long now, I found myself last night watching a con man on a local theater stage from an unusually timely point of view. To put it simply:...