John Stoltenberg

“It’s Our Most Jewish Play This Season”: A Q&A With Adam Immerwahr About ‘The Christians’ at Theater J

For the second show in his first season as artistic director of Theater J, the nation’s largest and most prominent Jewish theater, Adam Immerwahr picked a play with the counterintuitive title The...

Magic Time! ‘Milk Like Sugar’ at Mosaic Theater Company

This beautiful play about black teenagers with bleak futures left me with such a melancholy sadness that two days later (on what was then Election Day), it had not gone away. I share that not to keep...

Review: ‘Girl in the Red Corner’ at The Welders

Among the adages that keep women put down and passive is the one that goes, “Good girls don’t fight.” It’s a specious presumption that infects culture like an immobilizing toxin. It’s an addle-brained...

Review: ‘STREB Extreme Action’ at The Kennedy Center

Fans of STREB Extreme Action were out in force last night at The Kennedy Center. Enthusiasm in the Eisenhower Theater was at a fervor one might find at a rave or rock gig. The singular choreographic...

Review: ‘Wind Me Up, Maria!: A Go-Go Musical’ at Georgetown University

There’s a delectable new musical in town celebrating a distinctive genre of music called Go-Go, and it’s gotta be one of the most go-to fun times to be had in DC right now. The show is in the splendid...

Magic Time! ‘In the Cage, She Has a Fighting Chance’: A Q&A With Stephen Spotswood About His New Play ‘Girl in the Red Corner’ at The Welders

This seems to be the season in DC Metro Theater for pugilistic women. Women who box claimed the stage in Jen Silverman’s Collective Rage (just closed at Woolly Mammoth Theater Company). A woman who...

Magic Time! ‘Rameau’s Nephew’ at Spooky Action Theater

There comes a scene in Rameau’s Nephew at Spooky Action Theater when Robert Bowen Smith playing He (the titular character) coughs an aria. Literally. Just like an opera singer except without music or...

Magic Time! Mike Daisey on Playing ‘The Trump Card’ in the Turbulence of Trump

You might say The Trump Card keeps getting dealt one new hand after another. Since Mike Daisey’s monologue played to acclaim in August at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Donald Trump’s campaign for...

Review: ‘Beertown’ at dog & pony dc at Thurgood Marshall Center for Service & Heritage

I’d never been to Beertown, though I knew it by reputation as a must-visit burg. Folks had told me of this storied hamlet in the heartland where the local citizenry gather every five years to remember...

Review: ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at Gallaudet University’s Theater and Dance Program

Like a gift that keeps on giving, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream keeps on rekindling. Dreamer after dreamer reconceives it as if anew. And last night that classic spark reignited at Gallaudet...

Review: ‘Bloody Poetry’ at The Catholic University of America

So far as I can tell, The Catholic University of America’s Drama Department turns out a lot of local talent. I keep seeing mentions of it in program bios around town. Must be something good going on...

Magic Time! ‘Kiss’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Kiss is a work to be reckoned with. Its power and importance, its comedic wit and caustic intelligence, make it a major theatrical event of the season. For anyone who prefers shows to have substance...

Review: ‘Speech and Debate’ at George Washington University Department of Theatre and Dance

“Why can’t we talk about anything real in school?” The question is posed by Solomon, a nerdy high school student and wannabe journalist, whose teacher has forbidden him to report on the topic he wants...

Review #2: ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time’

Now and then there comes a production of a play that is so spectacularly original it confounds one’s every expectation of what can be achieved in theater. The story—a marvel in itself—could not be...

Review: ‘MotherStruck’ at The Studio Theatre

I happen to like solo performance pieces a lot and I’ve seen many. There’s something I love about the immediacy of a single performer claiming my attention—and maybe stirring my emotions or...

Magic Time! ‘The Gulf’ at Signature Theatre

One measure of the quality of a play is how it stays in one’s mind the next few days. Or the next weeks or months or years. Not just how it plays on stage. How it remains in the brain. There are no...

Review: ‘What We’re Up Against’ at The Keegan Theatre

Near the end of What We’re Up Against, Theresa Rebeck’s incisive comedy about workplace sexism—just opened in a kick-ass production at The Keegan Theatre—a question is posed by Eliza, a very talented...

Magic Time! ‘How To… Sex Education’ (Weekend Two)

Having enjoyed the first weekend of Rabble Crew Productions’ How To… Sex Education, I went back for seconds—another set of four short plays on the ever popular theme of sex…and the never popular topic...

Review: Yusuf/Cat Stevens’ “A Cat’s Attic” Concert at The Kennedy Center

Cat Stevens (as he was known then) last performed at The Kennedy Center back in November 1971 just months after it opened. Much has changed since then, including his name (which became Yusuf after he...

Magic Time! ‘How To… Sex Education’ at Rabble Crew Productions

Rabble Crew Productions has a proclivity for mounting edgy, sex-themed theater in fringey places around town. Last December they did Madeline Farrington’s Glory Us at The Fridge in Eastern Market, set...

Review: ‘brownsville song (b-side for tray)’ at Theater Alliance

Yesterday at The Anacostia Playhouse, the real world and the world onstage converged. It was like a communal emotion-meld through theater, the human heartbreak untold in too many headlines become the...

Review #2: ‘Collective Rage’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

“Can feminism be funny?” inquiring minds at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company want to know. For that is the conundrum that connects Sheila Callaghan’s Women Laughing Alone With Salad, Woolly’s cheeky hit...

Magic Time! ‘The Last Schwartz’ at Theater J

What is it that’s so tried and true about plays about siblings? Must be something universal, because there are so gosh darn many of them. Structurally they obviously make for auspicious cast lists,...

Magic Time! ‘Cloud Nine’ at The Studio Theatre

Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, which premiered in London in 1979, is rightly considered a landmark play. It is pivotal for me personally as well, ever since I saw the legendary Tommy Tune production...

Magic Time! ‘Come From Away’ at Ford’s Theatre: ‘A show on its way to Broadway that’s so moving and inspiring I would see it again in a heartbeat’

When I saw this new musical on the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11, there were no more than ten minutes during it when my eyes were dry. They welled up from the first scene. Sure, I know I tear up...

Review: ‘I Call My Brothers’ at Forum Theatre

Forum Theatre has a knack for picking trenchant works of theater that buzz with relevance to hot-button topics. Its current offering is a perfect case in point. Given this nation’s rising tide of...

Review: ‘Lobby Hero’ at 1st Stage

The imposing lobby of a tony Manhattan apartment building—all sleek gray marble, glass, and stainless steel—commands the spacious 1st Stage stage. Sound Designer Neil McFadden has created a...

Page-to-Stage New Play Festival: Brave Soul Collective and African-American Collective Theater

Two of DC’s most important independent theater collectives bearing witness as black artists to #BlackLivesMatter are Brave Soul Collective and African-American Collective Theater (ACT). Both...

Magic Time! “I Think About How Badly I Can Break a Heart Today”: A Q&A with Audrey Cefaly, Author of ‘The Gulf’ at Signature Theatre

John: I first discovered your writing when I saw Maytag Virgin during the Women’s Voices Theater Festival, and as I said when I interviewed you back then, “it was one of those experiences of an...

Magic Time! ‘Satchmo at the Waldorf’ at Mosaic Theater Company of DC

It is the morning after I saw a compelling and telling bioplay about Louis Armstrong just opened at Mosaic Theater Company, Terry Teachout’s Satchmo at the Waldorf. I have my earbuds in; I’m logged...

Step Afrika! Announces Free ‘Step Xplosion’ Tour August 24 – September 10, 2016

Step Afrika! will present free performances in all eight wards of DC from August 24 to September 20, 2016. The full schedule of 2016 tour dates is available online. Here is John Stoltenberg’s...

Magic Time! Kathleen Akerley’s ‘Fear’ at Longacre Lea

There’s a good chance that watching FEAR—Kathleen Akerley’s playfully subversive new comedy at Longacre Lea about a troupe of actors in the throes of performing Shakespeare—will change your perception...

Magic Time! ‘The Lonesome West’ at The Keegan Theatre

In real life, when we are spectators to two grown men facing off in dead-serious combat—right in front of us; with words, fists, lethal weapons, whatnot; unmediated by movies and such—our natural...

Magic Time! ‘Notes on My Theatergoing in London’

My four days in London last weekend offered time slots to see six plays—four evenings and two matinees. My strategy was to seek intriguing, fresh writing in a mix of West End, Off West End, and Fringe...

Magic Time! ‘(Re)Acts: #Orlando’ at Forum Theatre

Live theater is not where we turn to learn the news in real time. We have TV and Twitter and plenty other frenzied feeds for that. But live theater may be the most potent and important form we have...

Magic Time! A Report on ‘Double X’ at Schools Without Walls

S. Ann Johnson’s Double X—an exquisitely crafted choreopoem exploring the multicultural distinctions and connections among seven women—had its DC debut Saturday after appearances in Baltimore, New...

Review: ’99 – A Rock Opera’ by DC Dogs

Musical theater and the country could use a good renegade rock musical inspired by the Occupy Movement. The demonstrations that spread across America spurred by Occupy Wall Street shared a kindred...

Review: ‘Kurios – Cabinet of Curiosities’

Fans of Cirque du Soleil know to expect wonder, beauty, and thrills, and Cirque doesn’t disappoint. It’s a brilliantly executed brand that has become a global phenomenon (21 different productions are...

Review: ‘We Know How You Die!’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

I sure laughed a lot at the show I saw the other night at Woolly Mammoth Theatre. Gut-busting funny, it was. And I’d highly recommend you catch it…except it was made up on the spot, never to be seen...

Review: ‘Yellowman’ at The Anacostia Playhouse

I first saw Dael Orlandersmith’s Yellowman at the Manhattan Theater Club in 2002, with Orlandersmith herself in the role of the dark-skinned Alma and Howard W. Overshown as the light-skinned Eugene....

Magic Time! The Studio Theatre’s ‘Hand to God’: A Puppet Chat

So this strange thing happened. I was sitting at a table in a church basement that happened to be on the fourth floor of The Studio Theatre, and I was waiting to see a show called Hand to God. And...

Magic Time! ‘Blood, Sweat & Fears: A Grand Guignol Sick Cabaret’

As the local go-to theater company for carrying on the Grand Guignol tradition, Molotov Theatre Group mounts some of the most interesting combos of style and substance in town. There are a few other...

Updated July 12, 2016: On Parenting and a Play: Director Shirley Serotsky Talks About ‘Another Way Home’ at Theater J

I have admired Shirley Serotsky’s work as a director on such shows as Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy at Theater J in 2014 and Rapture, Blister, Burn at Round House Theatre in 2015. Shirley also serves as...

2016 Capital Fringe Review: “POWER!” Stokely Carmichael

I wish that recent events had not made this powerful theater experience so necessary. I wish that Capital Fringe would have come along again and this production would have warranted theatergoers’...

2016 Capital Fringe Review: ‘One Man Romeo’

The young actor and rapper Darius McCall fell so much in love with the role of Romeo that he longed to bring the character to life, by himself, alone on stage with but Shakespeare’s words and his own...

2016 Capital Fringe Review: ‘I Found That The Sun Will Rise Tomorrow’

Anna Snapp gives a robust, witty, and protean performance in this genuinely candid and insightful solo theater piece. Self-authored, and based on her own life, I Found That the Sun Will Rise Tomorrow...

2016 Capital Fringe Review: ‘The Golden Smile’

It is probably not a good idea, near the end of a maniacally inscrutable and incessantly unfunny musical, to have one character sing, apropos the show, “It’s over! It’s done!” and then have another...

Magic Time! 5 Reasons Capital Fringe Is a DC Treasure

The future of the Capital Fringe Festival has been uncertain since its brilliant and brave inception in 2006, but back in July 2013 its fate was especially iffy. The festival’s fabulously funky Fort...

Magic Time! Left-Handed Complement: Liam Forde on Acting With a Puppet in ‘Hand to God’ at Studio Theatre

Studio Theatre’s fourth floor has been turned into an amazing facsimile of a Lutheran church basement, complete with inspirational posters on the walls and seating at folding tables as if for a...

Magic Time! ‘Another Way Home’ at Theater J

You know you’ve just seen a play that hits a nerve about the distress of parents who have a troublesome, troubled son (whom they love but don’t know how to cope with) when you’re reading the paper the...