Magic Time!

Magic Time!: ‘Jeffrey’ at Rainbow Theatre Project

If there’s such a thing as gay wit, Paul Rudnick’s got a load of it. Imagine Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward if they could be out about it. Yeah, Rudnick ranks with them and then some. As proof, check out...

Magic Time!: ‘Washington Magic’ at the Arts Club of Washington

When I was a kid, magic tricks and puppet shows were forerunners to my love of theater. They were like my gateway drug. I got hooked on the wonder and live storytelling. And to this day I associate...

Magic Time!: ‘Kings’ at Studio Theatre

“Laws are like sausages,” goes the adage. “It’s better not to see them being made.” As it happens, I have a good mental picture of how sausages are made, because for three summers during college I...

Magic Time!: On Acting with a Conscience: A Q&A with Lianne Harvey, now appearing in ‘An Inspector Calls’

The character Lianne Harvey plays in J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, Sheila Birling, really fascinated me. Sheila stands out as no ordinary ingenue. During the course of the play, Sheila goes...

Magic Time!: ‘How to Keep an Alien’ by Solas Nua

I can’t recall seeing another play by someone who came to playwrighting from standup, but I’ll not soon forget how I laughed my feckin head off at Sonya Kelly’s How to Keep an Alien. Kelly, an Irish...

Magic Time!: ‘An Inspector Calls’ at Shakespeare Theatre Company

J. B. Priestley’s classic An Inspector Calls—a drawing-room drama set in England in 1912 and written there in 1944—has landed in DC with uncanny currency. Now at Sidney Harman Hall in a touring...

Magic Time!: Mike Daisey’s 18-Part, 30-Hour ‘A People’s History’ at Seattle Repertory Theatre

I remember being so bored by my high school American history class that I got a D in it. This was not normal. My report cards always had A’s and B’s. So the kindly elderly woman who taught the course,...

Magic Time!: ‘Cry It Out’ at Studio Theatre

Cry It Out—an exhilaratingly funny and touching comedy about new parenthood—is a joyous reminder that when a playwright of Molly Smith Metzler’s skill and compassion writes “close to home,” as she...

Magic Time!: ‘The Fever’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

If you’ve ever been in an acting class, a group-encounter session, a sensitivity training, or kindergarten, you’ll feel right at home in The Fever. Even if you’re by nature standoffish, an inveterate...

Magic Time!: ‘Actually’ by Theater J at Arena Stage

The vexing concept of consent in sex gets a seductively smart parsing in Anna Ziegler’s Actually. Now playing in an electrically well-acted Theater J production directed by Johanna Greunhut, Actually...

Magic Time!: ‘The Fall’ at Studio Theatre

There is so much to be blown away by in The Fall, the powerful and thrilling performance piece devised and performed by seven South African students. Their majestic musicality, their propulsive...

Magic Time!: ‘How I Learned to Drive’ at Round House Theatre

I’ve been wary of this play since it was first produced in 1997. I remember hearing that it was about a pedophile and his niece and that its treatment of the uncle was sympathetic. So I didn’t trust...

Magic Time!: ‘Chocolate Covered Ants’ by Restoration Stage at THEARC

When three hours in the theater elapse faster than many a 90-minute performance, it’s a good bet you’ve been in the thrall of a master storyteller. And that’s what happens in Chocolate Covered Ants,...

Magic Time!: Actor Michael Kevin Darnall Opens Up About Being Open on Stage

When Michael Kevin Darnall plays a character who is the focus of a long scene and we can watch every nuance and shading of his emotional expression without interruption, he can be transfixing. When I...

Magic Time!: ‘Safeguards’ by Brave Soul Collective at Anacostia Arts Center

Brave Soul Collective is a hidden gem of theatrical truthtelling about black men who are LGBTQ. Periodically the collective surfaces with a one-night-only showcase of work by local writing and...

Magic Time!: ‘How to Win a Race War’ at The Klunch

I know from my feminist antipornography activism that there is plenty of misogynist hate literature around. (The hard-core stuff is brutal, sadistic propaganda marketed to men arousing them to violate...

Magic Time!: ‘The Events’ at Theater Alliance

Theater Alliance’s The Events, now playing at Anacostia Playhouse, is one of several plays this season that deal with a mass shooting. (There’s also Pinky Swear’s Blight, coming October 20 to the same...

Magic Time!: ‘If I Forget’ at Studio Theatre

To paraphrase the famous Passover Seder line, “Why is this domestic drama different from all other domestic dramas?” Or, to put the impudent question another way, “What makes If I Forget a uniquely...

Magic Time!: ‘Gloria’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Count on Branden Jacobs-Jenkins to leave you whiplashed and shell-shocked. He hits nerve after nerve then goes for the jugular. Whatever he writes, see it. Woolly’s previous productions of...

Magic Time!: ‘The Interstellar Ghost Hour’ at Longacre Lea

Here’s an idea for a grad lit student in search of a dissertation topic: “Bewilderment and Brilliance in the Theater of Kathleen Akerley.” That thought flipped through my head after I watched The...

Magic Time!: ‘The Story of the Gun’ at Woolly Mammoth

Mike Daisey’s monolog The Story of the Gun is a show both hilarious and sobering, and he begins it with a wry riff on who we are who have come to see it. As he joshingly reminds us, we are liberal...

Magic Time!: ‘Dave’ at Arena Stage

You know those big live TV versions of blockbuster musicals that get broadcast decades after the show was a hit on the stage? Like, not until generations have come and gone? Well in the case of Dave,...

Magic Time!: A Report on ‘The Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company’

The prodigiously imaginative performance artist Holly Bass belongs to the first generation of her family not to pick cotton for a living. I learned that startling fact as I passed through an art...

Magic Time!: Mike Daisey Takes Aim at ‘The Story of the Gun’ in America

Masterful monologuist Mike Daisey returns to DC to skewer with humor another burning issue of the day. This time it’s America’s thing about guns. What’s that all about, anyway? How did guns get to be...

Magic Time!: ‘O Monsters’ at Capital Fringe and the Limits of Criticism

I went to see O Monsters, the radically abstract production created by Philadelphia’s New Paradise Laboratories, now playing in the Kogod Cradle at Arena as one of five curated productions in 2018...

Magic Time!: ‘East of the River’ at Anacostia Musical Theatre Lab

Community engagement is a noble aspiration for a lot of theaters around town. The challenge is to make theater matter to folks who live in the nabe. To connect the institution to the community, to be...

Magic Time!: ‘The Till Trilogy’ at Mosaic Theater Company

The murderous race hate that killed young Emmett Till in 1955 is alive and well. The impunity with which white assailants get away with it is still much with us. And the irony is that the iconic...

Love and Friendship IRL: A Q&A With Brandon McCoy and Brianna Letourneau About ‘Other Life Forms’ at Keegan Theatre

I went to see Other Life Forms, the new comedy at Keegan Theatre, not expecting to write about it. But the play changed my mind. I wasn’t even home yet when on an impulse I tweeted that Other Life...

Magic Time!: ‘The Emperor of Atlantis’ at The In Series

The Emperor of Atlantis—an operatic takedown of autocracy—is relevant to our times in freaky and haunting ways. And its backstory is chilling. Near the end of World War II, the Czech composer Victor...

“The Queerest Role I’ve Played”: A Q&A with Jon Hudson Odom About ‘Botticelli in the Fire’ at Woolly Mammoth

Jon Hudson Odom’s performance in Jordan Tannahill’s new play Botticelli in the Fire just blew me away. And it wasn’t the first time that had happened. I’ve been following his work for several years,...

Magic Time!: ‘The Scottsboro Boys’ at Signature Theatre

The musical The Scottsboro Boys tells a true story of heinous injustice driven by race hate, and the theatrical form is a minstrel show—bouyant upbeat dancing, rousing melodic singing, and buffoonish...

Magic Time!: ‘The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs’ at Spooky Action Theatre

The mystery at the center of this adroit drama keeps getting mysteriouser and mysteriouser: What’s in the small room at the top of the stairs? Playwright Carole Fréchette has crafted a cagey...

Magic Time!: ‘Republic Undone’ at The Metropolitan Club

Going back to Ancient Greece, theater has functioned as a forum for informed public debate—about war, religion, politics, all the issues relevant to the citizenry of the day. The Greeks had a word for...

Magic Time!: ’10 Million’ and ‘The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant’ at The Kennedy Center

Among the rich offerings in The Kennedy Center’s Artes de Cuba festival were two extraordinary works of theater, each performed but twice: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, from Teatro El Público,...

Magic Time!: ‘The Frederick Douglass Project’ by Solas Nua

In a tent pitched on a pier overlooking the Anacostia River, there is a powerfully important work of theater being performed. The work is The Frederick Douglass Project, commissioned to commemorate...

Magic Time!: ‘ “Master Harold”…and the Boys’ at Round House Theatre

One of the most quietly profound moments in Athol Fugard’s anti-apartheid play “Master Harold”…and the Boys—just opened in a powerfully moving production at Round House Theatre—happens in a simple...

Magic Time!: Bedroom Talk with Actors Dimitri Gann and Ryan Townsend About ‘Top and Bottom’ at Rainbow Theatre Project

Top and Bottom is a new gay comedy by Kevin Michael West and directed by Christopher Janson. It’s set in a hotel room where James, a wannabe “dom,” has planned an S&M-ish hookup with Tommy, supposedly...

Magic Time!: ‘Roz and Ray’ at Theater J

This is an absolutely absorbing medical drama performed with full-on passion by two of DC’s top-tier actors. Susan Rome plays Roz, a hematologist dedicated to her role as healer, and Tom Story plays...

Magic Time!: ‘Underground Railroad Game’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

“What the fuck was that?” a friend asked me at the opening night reception for this show at Woolly. To which, still reeling, I could only answer, “Yeah, what the fuck?” The cringe-inducing show we had...

Magic Time!: ‘Paper Dolls’ at Mosaic Theater Company of DC

Paper Dolls has such an open heart and such largesse of spirit that you might well leave the theater verklempt with hope. The play with songs by Philip Himberg, directed by Mark Brokaw, tells an...

Magic Time!: The Birth and Revelation of ‘Mom Baby God’: A Q&A with Playwright/Performer Madeline Joey Rose

Mom Baby God—a solo show written and performed by Madeline Joey Rose about the right’s attack on abortion rights—is as playful as it is powerful. The play centers on a fourteen-year-old girl,...

Magic Time!: Michael Urie Opens Up About His Hamlet at Shakespeare Theatre Company

When I had a chance to ask Michael Urie some questions about his performance as Hamlet, I learned he can hold forth as insightfully as the character he plays. Well, maybe minus the verse and plot. But...

Magic Time!: Katie Kleiger on Bonding and Being a Warrior in ‘The Wolves’ at Studio Theatre (Women’s Voices Theater Festival)

The reason I asked to interview Katie Kleiger is that after I saw her in Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves at Studio Theatre, I realized I had seen her on the same fourth-floor stage in Lucy Prebble’s The...

Magic Time!: Gloria Steinem Talks About ‘Sovereignty’ at Arena Stage (Women’s Voices Theater Festival)

“What Mary Kathryn Nagle has given us on stage tonight is the history we don’t learn,” said renowned feminist author and activist Gloria Steinem during one of the most buzzed-about talkbacks of the...

Magic Time!: ‘Jefferson’s Garden’ at Ford’s Theatre (Women’s Voices Theater Festival)

A portrait of George Washington hangs in Ford’s Theatre on the presidential box where Abraham Lincoln was shot. When you stop to think about it, this is an odd disconnect. Presumably faithful to what...

Magic Time!: ‘The Trial’ at Synetic Theater

Kafka’s nightmare novel about a man named Joseph K—who is arrested, detained, and tried but never told what he has done wrong—would seem perfect for Synetic Theater’s magic touch. A promising...

Magic Time!: ‘Guilt’ at Scena Theatre

Sex and guilt were linked in superstition before institutional Christianity came on the scene, but thanks to the medieval Catholic Church they got hooked up with theology too. It was in the runup to...

Magic Time!: “Claim All of Your Selves”: Caleen Sinnette Jennings on Her ‘Queens Girl’ Plays (Womens’ Voices Theater Festival Productions)

Erika Rose’s performance in Queens Girl in Africa is awesome to behold. She plays the playwright’s teenage self, named Jackie, plus her parents, school friends, and others, with an incandescence that...

Magic Time!: Inside ‘Amazing Grace’ at the Museum of the Bible: A Q&A with Performer Joshua Simon

When I saw the musical Amazing Grace I praised it to the skies. A blurb being used to promote the show is lifted from my review: “A gorgeous production of a glorious musical! Heart-stopping,...

Magic Time!: ‘The Birds and the Bees: Unabridged’ at Mosaic Theater Company

“Let’s rethink sex” has suddenly become a thing. Well, not suddenly maybe. But it certainly has new pertinence in this era of full-frontal disclosure. Which made the themes of The Birds and the Bees:...