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Arts Barn previews compelling 2020–2021 season

Arts On The Green, the organization that provides indispensable arts programming at a collection of venues on the beautiful Gaithersburg campus, has recently offered audiences a sneak peek at the...

Fade to black: Coronavirus closures force local theaters to rethink their futures

This article originally appeared in the April issue of District Fray Magazine. It is reprinted here with permission. The paint was still drying on the set of Signature Theatre’s world-premiere...

1st Stage announces dynamic 2020–2021 season

1st Stage, a vibrant professional company in Tysons, Virginia, recently announced their dynamic 2020-2021 season. This 13-year-old organization has grown from a grassroots collective of local artists...

DCMTA Spring 2020 Staff Favorites: Outstanding Design Elements in Professional Productions

Normally we who cover theater for DC Theater Arts collect our favorites as the year draws to a close, but this has not been a normal year. In mid-March, the 2020 season was interrupted by a pandemic...

What’s the future of live theater beyond COVID-19?: A point-counterpoint between Audrey Cefaly and Elliott Bales

What follows is an extraordinary conversation. It started as a Facebook post by award-winning playwright Audrey Cefaly. It was joined by her dear friend, acclaimed actor Elliott Bales, who doubles as...

DCMTA Spring 2020 Staff Favorites: Outstanding Performances in a Professional Production

Normally we who cover theater for DC Theater Arts collect our favorites as the year draws to a close, but this has not been a normal year. In mid-March the 2020 season was interrupted by a pandemic...

Olney Theatre Center announces ambitious 2020–2021 season

During a recent live-streamed event, Olney Theatre Center Artistic Director Jason Loewith unveiled a lineup of 17 plays, concerts, and presentations coming in 2020–2021 as part of the company’s 83rd...

The Kennedy Center and NSO reach new agreement in the face of COVID-19

After several days of collaborative discussions, Kennedy Center leadership and the musicians of the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) have reached a new agreement, a significant step in stabilizing...

DCMTA Spring 2020 Staff Favorites: Outstanding Professional Theater Productions

Normally we who cover theater for DC Theater Arts collect our favorites as the year draws to a close, but this has not been a normal year. In mid-March, the 2020 season was interrupted by a pandemic...

20th annual WATCH Award winners

Announcement of Awards: 20th Annual Washington Area Theatre Community Honors (THE WATCH AWARDS) The 2019 WATCH Award winners were announced on April 4th, 2020. The ceremony was canceled due to the...

Contemporary American Theater Festival rescheduled to July 2021

For the past thirty years, the Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, has produced and developed new plays in rotating repertory. DC Theater...

Arena Stage temporarily furloughs a majority of its staff

Arena Stage announced on Saturday, March 28th that it will temporarily furlough the majority of its staff starting on April 13th. 88 employees will be furloughed at that time. Furloughed employees...

Financial help for theaters and individuals to offset COVID-19 losses

During these difficult, uncertain times of the COVID-19 pandemic, we at DCMTA want to inform the theater community about financial relief that becomes available to nonprofits and individuals in the...

Artists Who Inspire! #2: Deb Sivigny

Welcome to the second installment of Artists Who Inspire! During this unprecedented shutdown of live theater, DCMTA will use this space to lift up local theater artists who are finding ways to remain...

COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund established for Washington theater community

As the world reels from the COVID-19 global pandemic, the Washington theater community— both institutions and individuals — alongside other entertainment and freelance industries, face financial...

Artists Who Inspire #1: Tia Shearer Bassett

Welcome to the first installment of Artists Who Inspire! During this unprecedented shutdown of live theater, DCMTA will use this space to lift up local theater artists who are finding ways to remain...

An open letter to the DMV theater community

As passionate theater lovers and as members of the DC Theater Arts leadership team, we applaud the DMV theaters that have announced closure or postponement of current and upcoming productions. We can...

Olney Theatre Center’s ‘The Amateurs’ is a comedy of ‘epidemic’ proportions

There is nothing like a good old-fashioned plague to get you pondering life’s big questions: the Bubonic Plague, the AIDS Crisis, COVID-19, really any epidemic will do. Of course, Jordan Harrison’s...

A harrowing ‘Pass Over’ powerfully performed at Studio Theatre

There is a drama on stage right now at Studio Theatre—Pass Over by Antoinette Nwandu—so harrowing it will stop your heart. In it, Christopher Lovell and Jalen Gilbert give two of the most powerful...

Monumental Theatre Company’s ‘Head Over Heels’ is a toe-tapping celebration of life, love, and self

After receiving a foreboding prophecy of loss and destruction, the King of Arcadia is determined to outwit the gods and save his kingdom’s “beat.” To do so, he takes his queen, two daughters, and...

Behind the lines: A pre-opening peek at 4615 Theatre’s ‘Museum 2040’

When Jordan Friend, the highly inventive founder of 4615 Theatre Company, invited me to attend a rehearsal of Museum 2040 a few weeks ago, I jumped at the opportunity. The show, billed as an...

“I want to make space for women who make mistakes”: A Q&A with Dani Stoller, author of ‘Easy Women Smoking Loose Cigarettes’ at Signature Theatre

Dani Stoller’s world-premiere comedy Easy Women Smoking Loose Cigarettes is funny and witty and in its own quirky way quite deep. Plus it puts the screw in screwball. Discovered in the SigWorks...

J’Nai Bridges’ debut in ‘Samson and Delilah’ is a dream come true

When J’Nai Bridges made her triumphant debut in Camille Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah Sunday night, it was the fulfillment of a dream. The young mezzo-soprano’s star has been rapidly rising — this...

Theater Alliance’s heartrending ‘This Bitter Earth’ portrays two gay men in loving color

A poetic and politically charged same-gender-loving love story, This Bitter Earth by Harrison David Rivers—now playing in a powerfully moving production at Theater Alliance—strips bare the hearts,...

All under one roof in Signature Theatre’s ‘Easy Women Smoking Loose Cigarettes’

Marian’s cheery Florida home – an over-decorated retirement nest she shares with second hubby Richard – has become a tropical haven for two adolescents in crisis. Richard’s pregnant niece Kitty, whose...

Shakespeare Theatre stages a stunning ‘Timon of Athens’ for modern audiences

Among Shakespeare’s plays are a special few whose relevance waxes and wanes with the times. They disappear from the stage for years, only to re-emerge when they are ready to speak to our issues, our...

Nu Sass’s world premiere of ‘Weep’ is an arresting, unflinching peek into complicated lives

Trigger warning. Nu Sass’s world premiere of Weep is an arresting, unflinching peek into complicated lives with emotionally charged scenes and character collisions. It is a slowly building...

Actor Mikéah Jennings unpacks his powerful performance in ‘Shipwreck’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre

Anne Washburn’s Shipwreck: A History Play About 2017 is an epic, scorching, and surreal satire of white liberalism in the era of Trump. It takes place at that ominous juncture in recent American...

James Baldwin’s ‘Amen Corner’ bears witness to the Beloved Community

Corners can be safe spaces for hiding. There’s comfort in corners because they’re out of sight and out of danger. In The Amen Corner, James Baldwin’s dilemma is whether to embrace the inner life of...

In ‘Boy’ at Keegan Theatre, the anguish of a gender experiment gone wrong

“Oh, god. Maybe it didn’t work,” the mother exclaims in alarm. It’s the moment in this hold-your-breath drama when she realizes the gender experiment done on her child, one of two identical twins born...

Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s ‘Mother Road’ brings powerful journey to Arena Stage

William Joad is a proud Oklahoma farmer with roots to the land as old and deep as the fields his family has tended for generations. But after decades of dedication, dust and sweat poured into the...

A fascinating rendering of ‘The King’s Speech’ at the National Theatre

Given that so many plays and films these days are based on, drawn from or inspired by each other, it is worth examining the differences between these media and the treatments they require. The King’s...

DC theater community mourns passing of Victor Shargai

Update: February 13, 2020: The Washington theatre community remains in mourning over the loss of Victor Shargai, long-time theatreWashington board chair, theater lover, and philanthropist, who passed...

Pulitzer Prize-winner Nilo Cruz discusses his new play ‘Exquisite Agony,’ now playing at GALA Hispanic Theatre

In a particularly poignant scene in Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz’s Exquisite Agony, a heart transplant recipient named Amer has an intimate conversation with Romy, the pregnant daughter...

‘The 39 Steps’ at Constellation: a walk on the hilarious side

For an evening of dry wit and sophisticated, subtle humor, make your way…Oh forget it. Just come to Constellation Theatre’s The 39 Steps for a couple hours of cheesy lines, old situations, new...

Synetic Theater delivers visually stunning, ballet-driven adaptation of ‘Phantom of the Opera’

As Synetic Theater races through its rowdy teenage years (not quite 20, yet), they have earned a reputation for finely-honed narrative dance, brilliant original music, and spectacular visual effects....

Who is Black? Signature Theatre’s ‘Gun & Powder’ hits a national nerve

It may surprise you (as it did me) that the title of this melodic world-premiere musical does not refer to gunpowder. The word gun means there’s a pistol (which gets dramatically deployed). But the...

Signature Theatre’s commanding ‘Gun & Powder’ pulls no punches

Raw one moment, richly comic the next. Subtle in one scene, directly challenging the audience the next. The world premiere musical Gun & Powder at Signature Theatre is strikingly effective...

Rorschach’s ‘The Toxic Avenger’ is the campy musical you didn’t know you needed in your life

Poor Melvin Ferd the Third just can’t catch a break. The ladies shun him, the jocks harass him, and the pretty blind librarian he has a crush on? Well, she thinks he’s a scrawny dweeb. But don’t fret...

Beyond the script: Playwright Steven Dietz talks about ‘Bloomsday,’ a love story in which past and present collide

You don’t have to read Ulysses—or, for that matter, know anything about James Joyce, its author, or Leopold Bloom, its hapless hero—to love Bloomsday. The play, a gentle romance now blossoming in its...

2020 Helen Hayes nominations are announced

At a February 3, 2020 celebration honoring theatre excellence on stages across the Washington area, theatre artists, administrators, patrons, and special guests gathered in the National Theatre’s...

‘Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson’ at Dominion Stage rethinks how racist history rocks on

Dominion Stage has given this rowdy, irreverent, and rollicking rock musical a remarkably woke production that is as rousing as it is reflective and as satiric as it is unsettling. Set in 1800s...

The political becomes personal in Olney Theatre Center’s ‘Miss You Like Hell’

At Friendship Park, on the US-Mexico border just south of San Diego, from 10 am to 2 pm Saturdays and Sundays, 10 people at a time on the US side can see, and talk through a fence, with friends or...

‘Next to Normal’ makes a triumphant DC return at the Kennedy Center

In 2020, isn’t all of DC just trying to get by with something “next” to normal? We’re going about our daily lives while there’s an impeachment trial going on. A foreign leader was recently...

‘Silent Sky’ at Ford’s Theatre celebrates early female astronomers who reached for the stars

Two generations before the African American space scientists immortalized in the film Hidden Figures propped up America’s nascent space program, another group of pioneering female “computers” huddled...

Round House’s ‘Spring Awakening’ captures the essence of teenage angst

With her green roots and sneakers that spout “fuck you,” Billie Eilish, who swept Sunday night’s pop Grammys, sings a new song for a new generation. Her 2020 teen angst recalls hardcore punk and rock...

‘The Royale’ Director Paige Hernandez talks boxing, hip hop, and the virtue of politeness

Multidisciplinary artist Paige Hernandez is not a fan of boundaries. Whether performing, directing or teaching, the Baltimore native has made a career out of blending artistic forms and reaching...

Prologue Theatre revisits the day after 9-11 in ‘Recent Tragic Events’

On September 12, 2001, after a stunning halt to nearly all normal activity, life resumed for most Americans. And yet, we knew that everything had changed. Our sense of security was shattered. More...

‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ at Arena: women fighting their forever war

You will not this season see a more beautiful, emotionally wrenching portrayal of profound love than in Arena Stage’s production of Ursula Rani Sarma’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. Based on Khaled...

Getting a hometown kick out of ‘Kinky Boots’

Sizzle sells, or as Kinky Boots proved on Broadway in 2013, “The Sex Is In the Heel.” Why was the musical named Kinky Boots? Maybe Fetish Footwear didn’t have quite the same kick. … Sorry. Toby’s...