John Stoltenberg

Review: ‘Mariposa & the Saint’ by Arcturus Theater Company

The very transportable set for this touring production consists of a small enclosure of flimsy, fragile fabric cubes painted to look like stone blocks but really as insubstantial as little laundry...

Review: ‘Chalk’ at We Happy Few Productions

There’s an ancient child-custody legend about two women who claim to be the mother of the same infant. In the well-known Hebrew Bible version, their dispute is resolved when King Solomon orders the...

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...

Review: ‘No-No Boy’ at Pan Asian Repertory Theatre

No-No Boy is an extraordinary and essential play. It’s about what happened to innocent people when this country demonized and incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II. To witness it now—as...

Review: ‘Matt & Ben’ at Flying V

After filming not a few Rotten Tomatoes targets and appearing in too many tabloid headlines, the real Ben Affleck has cleaned up and redeemed himself in the public stargaze, both professionally and...

Review #1: ‘Going to a Place Where You Already Are’ at Theater Alliance

Whatever your mental picture of heaven, the funny and beautifully moving production of Bekah Brunstetter’s Going to a Place Where You Already Are just opened at Theater Alliance may alter it....

Magic Time! ‘An Octoroon’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon wears irony on its sleeve with the same effrontery that three of its characters wear red, white, and black greasepaint to dissemble “race.” Just opened at Woolly...

Magic Time! Theater Against Type: A Q&A With Actors Jeremy Keith Hunter and Shravan Amin About Performing ‘When January Feels Like Summer’

After I saw When January Feels Like Summer—Cori Thomas’s counter-stereotypical romantic comedy at Mosaic Theater Company—I found myself thinking back to what happens between two particular characters....

Magic Time! A Report on ’24/7′ at African-American Collective Theater

For the 24th year, the African-American Collective Theater marked DC Black Pride Weekend with readings of seven short plays, collectively titled 24/7, all written and directed by Alan Sharpe, whose...

Review: Ireland 100: ‘riverrun’ at The Kennedy Center

DC audiences last saw Olwen Fouéré in Yaël Farber’s Salomé at the Shakespeare Theatre Company playing the narrator character Nameless Woman. With her striking long white hair, deep vocal register, and...

Review: ‘Blackberry Winter’ at Forum Theatre

Does a play about an incurable progressive disease not sound like something you’d care to see? Does a character’s long, lone monologue about her mother’s memory loss to Alzheimer’s not seem appealing?...

Magic Time! ‘When January Feels Like Summer’ at Mosaic Theater Company of DC

Mosaic Theater Company of DC tops off its prodigious first season with an improbably romantic comedy by Liberian-American playwright Cori Thomas. It’s about people from different cultures who you...

Magic Time! ‘Hedda Gabler’ at Studio Theatre

Watching Julia Coffey’s feline and feral performance in the title role of Studio Theatre’s sleek and stark staging of Hedda Gabler is to witness the trainwreck that is Ibsen’s enigmatic character in a...

Review: ‘Martin Luther on Trial’ at The Lansburgh Theatre

Martin Luther on Trial, the new play by Chris Cragin-Day and Max McLean that had its world premiere in DC at the Lansburgh Theatre, joins the canon of great theatrical works about major figures in...

Review #1: ‘An American Daughter’ at The Keegan Theatre

We can thank the fickle fates who determine the fluky destinies of local theater programming for Keegan Theatre’s inspired late addition of Wendy Wasserstein’s An American Daughter to its spring...

Magic Time! ‘The Beauty and Ugliness of Martin Luther’: A Q&A With Playwright Chris Cragin-Day

On October 31, 1517, a young monk named Martin Luther nailed a list of 95 theses to a cathedral door in Wittenberg, Germany. It was a hammering heard round the world. On the eve of the 500th...

Review: ‘The Body of an American’ at Theater J

A true story that begins with the desecration of a dead body becomes, before our eyes and hearts, a living and breathing buddy story. Dan O’Brien’s The Body of an American is an intimate two-hander...

Review: ‘Transmission’ at The Welders

You know you’re having an unorthodox experience in theater when there’s a near absence of dramatic action in front of you but an epic interplay of ideas happening in your brain. So it goes in...

Magic Time! ‘Lord of the Flies’ at Imagination Stage

When Randy Baker told me he had directed a production of Lord of the Flies with a cast of mostly teenage girls, I knew I had to see it. William Golding’s classic about British schoolboys whose...

Review: ‘The Electric Baby’ at Rorschach Theatre

At the center of this beautifully ambiguous and hauntingly honest play is a sick infant. The baby is peculiar, perhaps mythically so, in that it glows like the moon. As we enter the theater, the...

Review: ‘C.S. Lewis Onstage: The Most Reluctant Convert’ at Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Lansburgh Theatre

Believe it or not, this is one terrific piece of theater. It’s a one-man play about an influential, world-class thinker that’s every bit as smart, fascinating, and satisfying as the best such solo...

‘Talking Shop and Taking Stock With Ari Roth’ by John Stoltenberg and David Siegel

There was a buzz of high energy as we walked into Ari Roth’s office at the Atlas Performing Arts Center to meet with the Founding Artistic Director of Mosaic Theater Company of DC. We wanted to talk...

Review: ‘Cloud Nine’ at Gallaudet University Theatre and Dance Program

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

‘My Queer Body’ at The Rainbow Theatre Project

Inside the beltway bubble of local theater making, it’s easy to forget how many U.S. citizens are indifferent, if not antipathetic, to live theater. Mainly they express this by voting with their...

Magic Time! ‘The Nether’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Playwright Jennifer Haley has seen the future and it’s The Nether, her cerebrally chilling thriller about future tech and future sex. Just opened at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in a fantastical...

Magic Time! ‘After the War’ at Mosaic Theater Company of DC

“A prophet is not without honor except in his own country, among his own relatives, and in his own house,” said a certain prophet of Nazareth long ago. Subtract the word “prophet,” swap in...

Magic Time! The Cathartic Comedy of Martin McDonagh: A Q&A with Yury Urnov, Director of Forum Theatre’s ‘The Pillowman’

Martin McDonagh is one my favorite living English-language playwrights and I’m not really sure why. His plays are hilarious and horrific at the same time. And I experienced that counterintuitive combo...

Magic Time! ‘Falling Out of Time’ at Theater J in Verse

There is so much sorrow in this show Nine fine actors playing nine parents All mourning dead children Searching to see them again Seeking to be with them one more time Speaking words of unspeakable...

Magic Time! “Moment’ at The Studio Theatre

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” as Leo Tolstoy famously said. Had Tolstoy seen Studio Theatre’s penetrating production of Deirdre Kinahan’s lacerating...

Magic Time! ‘1984’ at Shakespeare Theatre Company

Shakespeare Theatre Company has missed no opportunity to issue advisories to audiences about to attend the spectacularly intense Headlong production of George Orwell’s 1984, now on stage at the...

Magic Time! OpenStage New Works Showcase

The theater term “packed house” took on all new meaning for me the night I caught this month’s OpenStage New Works Showcase. Not only was there no empty folding chair; the show went on stage in what...

Magic Time! ‘They Don’t Pay? We Won’t Pay!’ at Ambassador Theater

In politics, the expression “Marxist farce” could well be a slur hurled by some puerile and petulant presidential hopeful (you never know these days). In theater, however, the term “Marxist farce” has...

Review: ‘Sarafina!’ at Howard University

Even if you already know how inspiring and moving this show is, from seeing the film or the musical on stage, you are in for a spirit-lifting, heart-leaping, foot-stomping thrill when you experience...

Review: ‘Word Becomes Flesh’ & ‘for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf’ at Theater Alliance

There is a critical conversation going on in Anacostia right now that may be one of the most urgent and honest exchanges between black women and black men the American theater has ever known. The...

Review: ‘RIOT’ at The Highwood Theatre

Last night in a small, tucked-away space in Silver Spring, I watched a “real time” drama so exciting and original, so drop-dead funny and knock-out suspenseful, that I left the theater dazed and...

Magic Time! ‘Promised Land’ at Mosaic Theater Company of DC

At a point in Mosaic Theater’s Promised Land—a powerhouse of a play performed inside an intimate space that’s more like a concrete bunker than a black box—we see the searing image of people fenced...

Magic Time! A Conversation with Manu Kumasi About ‘Lost in the Stars’

“The situation in 1940s apartheid South Africa is very similar to what was seen in 1940’s America, 1960’s America, 1980’s America, and even what we see in the present day.” I was talking with Manu...

Magic Time! ‘Constellations’ at The Studio Theatre

We enter a mini coliseum and take our seats on cushions of many colors on one of several rows of blue benches encircling the blank stage. The dim lighting feels hallowed; the music, reverential. There...

Review: ‘Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet’ at Howard University

Last night I had the great satisfaction of watching Howard University students take on the challenge of a certifiably risk-taking play—Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet—and with...

Magic Time! ‘Backstage with the Women of ‘The Sisters Rosensweig’ at Theater J’

When I recently read Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig, which opened in 1992, I sensed it was written in response to the women’s movement at the time. Wasserstein’s 1988 The Heidi Chronicles,...

Review: ‘When the Rain Stops Falling’ at 1st Stage

This play by Andrew Bovell in this 1st Stage production burned so many astounding images onto my brain—and sent into my ears so many searing exchanges—that my head is still spinning. For instance...

Magic Time! ‘Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3)’ at Round House Theatre

The production of Suzan-Lori Parks’ acclaimed three-part saga now having its regional premiere at Round House Theatre is some of the most amazing storytelling I’ve seen on stage. Amazing on account of...

Magic Time! ‘The Glass Menagerie’ at Ford’s Theatre

What’s the best way to stage a modern classic that is both reverential and revelatory? How does one mount a production that is respectful of the author’s intent yet freshly insightful. How can a...

Review: ‘I Shall Not Hate’ at Mosaic Theater Company of DC

It was a record-setting blizzard, not prescient season planning, that resulted in Mosaic Theater Company’s rescheduling the opening of I Shall Not Hate to last night, International Holocaust Memorial...

Magic Time! An Interview With Kieyontaye D. Johnson-Carter, Author of ‘Love in Time of HIV’

When I first saw Love in Time of HIV in May 2012, I was deeply impressed. Giving voice to a young generation’s encounter with the health crisis left them by their elders, the play by Kieyontaye D....

Magic Time! ‘The Critic & The Real Inspector Hound’ at Shakespeare Theatre Company

I just love it when theater laughs at itself. Who can forget the clockwork guffaws of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, or Shakespeare’s enchanting send-up of theatrical conceits in the “Pyramus and Thisbe”...

Magic Time! A Look at ‘Wrestling Jerusalem’ at Mosaic Theater Company of DC

“It’s complicated.” So begins—on a note of supreme understatement—Writer/Performer Aaron Davidman’s captivating and insight-rich solo show, Wrestling Jerusalem, the third provocative production in...

(Re)Acts: ‘Forced From Home #RefugeeCrisis’ at Forum Theatre

The event had a provocative hashtag in its title: As if to reference an emergency that is tragically trending worldwide. As if to signal the evening’s explicit link to a global community of concern....

‘Stars of David: Story to Song’ at Theater J

Stars of David: Story to Song—a rapturously beautiful concert musical now in a limited engagement at Theater J—is a unique blend of thrilling singing and insightful biography. Illuminating incidents...

A Report on Klecksography: ‘Island of the Misfit Toys’ at Rorschach Theatre

Rorschach Theatre has produced another one-night-only show in its adventurous and eclectic Klecksography series, and Saturday night I went to report on what I saw. If I had to encapsulate the evening...