Robert Michael Oliver

Spine: ‘Famous Puppet Death Scenes’

Gordon Craig, one of the early giants of modern theatre, provocatively wrote: “There is only one actor – nay one man – who has the soul of the dramatic poet, and who has ever served as the true and...

‘A Very Pointless Holiday Spectacular’ at Pointless Theatre Company

Are you tired of Christmas shows that urge you to give turkeys to the poor, or lumps of coal to bad children, or sweets to your beloved nutcracker? Are you tired of listening to news about the Islamic...

Spine: Feeling Blue? Escape to ‘Five Guys Named Moe’

A man staggers onto the stage at Arena’s Kreeger Theater. Nomax, played with deep loss by Kevin McAllister, has offended his girl with yet another drunken night. He sings “Early in the Morning,” an...

Spine: What Happens when Porno, Isabella Rossellini, and Bio-Diversity Collide? Who Can Say “STEAM”? Who Can Say Green Porno Live?

To be sure, some of Lisner’s audience came for the sex–explicit, diverse, and environmentally conscious. Some came for the celebrity–a noted model and film actress (Blue Velvet) with a legendary...

‘Nightfall with Edgar Allan Poe’ at Molotov Theatre Group

Nightfall with Edgar Allan Poe is an adaptation of four of Poe’s better known tales of horror: The Raven, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Tell-Tale Heart. Playwright...

Spine: Hip-Hop, Flow, and ‘How We Got On’

When I think of Hip-Hop my imagination immediately flies to urban America, to a gritty, “tougher than leather” New York City filled with N.W.A, LL Cool J, and of course Public Enemy (#1). When I think...

Spine: ‘Julius Caesar, “et tu Brute?” and You’

Shakespeare, the humanist; Shakespeare, the poet; Shakespeare, the political playwright; Shakespeare, the fatalist. Before he passed away, my 87-year-old father used to quiz members of the younger...

‘Visble Language’ at WSC Avant Bard

This weekend at Gallaudet’s Eastman Studio Theatre WSC Avant Bard and Gallaudet University Theatre and Dance Program opened their world premiere, historically based musical, Visible Language. Aside...

Spine: ‘Whose War? Our War? Their War?’

The National Civil War Project presents the work of “a multi-city, multi-year collaboration between four universities and five performing arts organizations to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the...

‘Rage’ at Ambassador Theater

Michele Riml’s Rage made its US premiere this week at Flashpoint’s Mead Theatre Lab. A production of Ambassador Theater, directed by Joe Banno, Rage explores the dynamics of adolescent rage from a...

‘The Taming of the Shrew’ at Pallas Theatre Collective

Shakespeare’s Shrew is always a challenge. Misogynistic in sentiment, slapstickishly machismo in design, its story of how to tame a headstrong, stubborn woman couldn’t be more ethically risky,...

Spine: Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry, and Elmer Gantry the Musical

The American musical does not lend itself well to big ideas, particularly if they possess any degree of complexity. Keep the ideas as simple and melodramatic as the plots that drive them. In Signature...

Spine: Ontologically Speaking (Perhaps) Absolutely!

In Luigi Pirandelo’s most famous play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, the frustrated theatrical director demands that the father of the wandering character-clan stop his endless theorizing and...

‘Oedipus the King’ at Catholic University

Oedipus the King has long been considered the archetypical tragedy. Jam packed with irony, Sophocles lays bare the heartbreak of the human condition. People and especially the ruling elites, no matter...

‘creature’ at Deviated Theatre at Dance Place

In Margaret Atwood’s futuristic novel Oryx and Crake, the cutting-edge of modern science creates the Crakes, genetically modified human beings whose beauty is only matched by the healing power of...

‘Marie Antoinette’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

In Woolly Mammoth’s Marie Antoinette the doomed, dark-shades donning Queen of France enters with two ladies-in-waiting. She slips off her robe, revealing an oh-so-modern two-piece bathing suit. She...

‘The Shoplifters’ at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater

The under-affluent of this country find small change on America’s stages: under-represented more often than not, they are the butt of jokes and edgy satires and, on DC stages, are presented as...

Spine: Who’s the Fool in ‘Fool for Love’?

Round House Theatre has opened its 2014 season with Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love (1983), one of his many scripts–Curse of the Starving Class (1976), Buried Child (1979), True West (1980) and A Lie of...

Globe Theatre’s ‘King Lear’ at Folger Theatre

The power of Shakespeare’s tragedies lies in their ability to speak to both the political and the personal. King Lear is an exemplar in this regard. Not only does the empire collapse and the royal...

‘White Suit Science’ at Single Carrot Theatre

Baltimore’s Single Carrot Theatre has a new theatrical home, a new artistic director, and a new season with a brand new series of contemporary plays. Shawn Reddy’s White Suit Science inaugurates...

‘The Understudy’ at Everyman Theatre

Are you sick and tired of yet another big-budget Hollywood action-adventure film with angry tornados, humongous sharks, or killer asteroids? Are you sick and tired of yet another celebrity persona...

‘Stupid Fucking Bird’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Stupid Fucking Bird, Aaron Posner’s 2013 adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s late 19th century The Seagull, returns like the phoenix to Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company with its stellar cast and crisp...

Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF): ‘One Night’

Women in uniform in the military. Women in uniform in the foxholes. Women in uniform. Sexual assault. Of both men and women. Charles Fuller’s new play, One Night, tackles head on one of the most...

Comtemporary American Theater Festival (CATF): ‘Uncanny Valley’

We are definitely a culture acraze with technology. I-Phones are only on the lower end of the spectrum: we have virtual realities, simulated sports, robotic housecleaners, robotic warehouse workers,...

Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF) Review: ‘Dead and Breathing’

Despite the deus ex machina that ends the show—the miracle that I don’t mind mentioning because playwrights that resort to miracles as conclusions should have their audiences warned in advance—Dead...

Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF) Review: ‘North of the Boulevard’

North of the Boulevard is not for the faint of heart; neither is it for the prudish or the overly sensitive; nor is it for those who require anything close to political correctness. North of the...

Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF) Review: ‘The Ashes Under Gait City’

How does one create a social movement? How does one create a community? How does one create a mecca for a movement and a community? New play The Ashes Under Gait City by Christina Anderson concerns...

Capital Fringe 2014 Preview: ‘Song of Myself: The Whitman Project’ by Robert Michael Oliver

Song of Myself: The Whitman Project, a One-Man Show that Contains Multitudes I’ve had a love affair with poetry that reaches back over 40 years, years before my career as an educator and theatre...

‘Healing Wars’ at Arena Stage at The Mead Center for American Theater

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wage on; in Syria, the blood still flows, as it does in Somalia and South Sudan; in Mexico, death continues to pile up bodies in the drug war, as they do in America’s...

‘Grounded’ at The Studio Theatre

America’s air war–first there was the B-17 Flying Fortress, then the B-52 Stratofortress, then the F-16 Fighting Falcon, then the Cruise Missile, then Precision Guided Munitions (or Smart Bombs), then...

‘Private Lives’ at Shakespeare Theatre Company

Noel Coward’s 1930 comedy Private Lives, now playing at Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Lansburgh Theatre, could not be more richly produced, more beautifully and expertly acted, or more soundly staged....

SPINE: Theatre, History & Culture in the Belly of the Beast: ‘The Last Days of Judas, Jesus, Justice, and the Born Again?’

“When will the cold Christ Quit breathing twice” Robert Hazel, American Poet Apparently never, or at least not until a new god, Christ’s child perhaps, takes his place on Mount New York City. Until...

‘Bloody Poetry’ at Taffety Punk Theatre Company at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop

William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats–the English Romantic Poets, believers in love, nature, passion, instinct, revolution, and glory....

‘Three Men in a Boat (To say nothing of the dog)’ at Synetic Theater

Cultish musical enthusiasts have The Rocky Horror Show, movie-goers have Night of the Living Dead, 60’s rockers had The Grateful Dead, and literary enthusiasts have Three Men in a Boat (To say nothing...

SPINE: Theatre, Culture, and History in the Belly of the Beast: “THE ADMISSION: The Theatre of War and National Identity, Lovely or Otherwise”

I recently experienced Motti Lerner’s The Admission, Theatre J’s production remounted by Busboys & Poets at Studio Theatre (my review is here). The controversy that the play generated was surprising...

SPINE: Theatre, Culture, and History in the Belly of the Beast: ‘Anacostia Is the New Downtown’ by Robert Michael Oliver

With today’s article, we welcome Robert Michael Oliver as he inaugurates his new column SPINE: Theatre, Culture, and History in the Belly of the Beast on DCMetroTheaterArts. Anacostia Is the New...