Mosaic Theater

Reginald L. Douglas named Mosaic Theater artistic director

Mosaic’s mission to produce transformational art that reflects DC’s diverse voices aligns with Douglas’s vision and hope for theater.

Dad and daughter wing it in ‘Birds of North America’ at Mosaic

Climate change, human choices, and the desire to find understanding color this compelling and unique narrative.

Peter’s Alley returns to the stage with acclaimed drama ‘Proof’

A play about the unknowability of love and the mysteries of mathematics.

Mosaic’s searing ‘Keffiyeh/Made in China’ now a single video on demand

Originally seven short episodes, Dalia Taha’s trenchant play about Palestinian life under occupation has been re-released as a 75-minute virtual production.

Mosaic suspends season opener as not COVID safe

‘My Father, My Martyr, and Me’ — a solo show with audience participation and dancing in an intimate space — could not meet current requirements.

A Juneteenth benchmark of local #WeSeeYouWAT action

A measure of antiracist work underway and a reminder of work yet to be done.

In Mosaic’s darkly funny ‘Inherit the Windbag,’ an epic bickerfest (ep. 8)

Mosaic Theater Company’s web series Inherit the Windbag is a darkly funny revisitation of a debate between two larger-than-life figures. During the 1968 Democratic and Republican National Conventions,...

#WeSeeYou antiracist accountability report includes 11 DMV theaters

An accountability report released by the We See You, White American Theater collective (WSYWAT) points to more than 100 theater institutions nationwide that have responded to the group’s BIPOC Demands...

Meet the talented teens who won Mosaic’s playwriting contest

Mosaic Theater Company announces and celebrates the talented winners of its inaugural Playwriting Contest for high school students. Each winning play will receive a reading by professional actors as...

A son summons his absent father in ‘Dear Mapel’ at Mosaic Theater

Urgent times call for urgent theater. And urgent theater has been Mosaic Theater Company’s calling card since its founding — rather unexpectedly — five years ago, by artistic director/playwright Ari...

Update: Mosaic’s #ENOUGH plays against gun violence now available on Vimeo

Mosaic Theater Company will participate in the nationwide reading of #ENOUGH: Plays to End Gun Violence, seven winning short plays in a nationwide competition for middle and high school students. On...

Mosaic Theater to move on without its founding artistic director, Ari Roth

In a meeting Tuesday night, November 17, 2020, the 26-member board of Mosaic Theater Company of DC unanimously accepted the resignation of Ari Roth, who founded the company six years ago “to be a home...

How DMV theaters are strategizing for reopening

With the fall season and following seasons still only tentatively planned, arts organizations are taking the time to focus on a reopening strategy that makes the most sense for their staff,...

Mosaic Theater heads into fall season recommitted to anti-racism

A monthslong period of intensive introspection and evolution at Mosaic Theater Company, led by a recommitment to anti-racism, has culminated in the company’s recent announcement of fall programming,...

Mosaic Theater announces postponements and temporary leadership change

Mosaic Theater Company has canceled its plans to open Alexandra Petri’s Inherit the Wind in August and announced suspension of its on-stage season through 2020. At the same time, Mosaic announced,...

The stirring street theater of Black Lives Matter in DC (photos)

The sheer creativity and inventiveness of the protesters was on full display at every turn as they each seemed to come prepared with energy and a message. As if re-experiencing What to Send Up When It...

Mosaic Theater Company promises provocative 2020–2021 season

In the face of global crisis and economic uncertainty, Mosaic Theater Company of DC draws inspiration for its new season from a nucleus of towering yet under-appreciated figures in history. These...

In virtual ‘Borders,’ the radical realism of a gay meetup on Grindr

Borders, a play by Nimrod Danishman, tells the story of two young men—Boaz (Eli Schoenfeld), an Israeli, and George (Adrian Rifat), who is Lebanese—who meet on Grindr and fall in love despite their...

Mosaic Theater welcomes Psalmayene 24 as playwright-in-residence

Mosaic Theater Company and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation have announced the illustrious recipient of their National Playwright Residency Program Grant—Veteran DC playwright, director, and Helen...

Channeling chutzpah in ‘Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World’ at Mosaic

Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World—the award-winning play now enjoying its DC debut at Mosaic Theater—is as delicious a romp as any that’s come along in a while. Billed as a romantic comedy,...

Mosaic goes rom-com with ‘Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World’

This thoroughly delightful offering from Mosaic Theater Company has all the makings of a lighthearted rom-com. Boy picks up girl. He invites her to his place. She initiates sex. It’s hot. Though they...

DCMTA 2019 Staff Favorites: Outstanding Design Elements in Professional Productions

As the year draws to a close, we asked DCMTA writers to think back on the shows that left an indelible impression on them in 2019. In this category, outstanding professional design, we recognize:...

At Mosaic’s ‘Eureka Day,’ a class in laughs and spats is in session

The five adults seated onstage in a children’s classroom each have a kid enrolled in this private day school, which like the play we’re watching is named Eureka Day. These earnest parents are all...

Mosaic Theater’s ‘Eureka Day’ puts immunization in the hot seat

In Samoa, 68 people – mostly children – have died of measles in recent weeks, victims of an abysmally low immunization rate resulting, in significant part, from misinformation spread on social media...

“All I had to do was listen”: Playwright Norman Yeung rethinks his ‘Theory’

By Norman Yeung That Theory has gained urgency and relevance since I wrote the first draft in 2009 is uncanny and alarming. Over ten years of innumerable workshops, readings, and productions, the...

Mosaic’s brazenly brainy ‘Theory’ is both a treatise and a treat (Magic Time!)

Academia has inspired several thematically penetrating plays featuring female protagonists—the two teachers falsely accused of being lesbian lovers, for instance, in Lillian Hellman’s 1934 The...

Mosaic’s ‘Theory:’ an embodiment of ‘wokeness’ besieged

Canadian playwright Norman Yeung’s Theory, in its American premiere at Mosaic Theater, seeks to be, in the words of Mosaic’s press release, “a hot button play for our digital moment.” Yeung packs a...

Page to Stage Festival 2019: Tastings from a Buffet (Part Two)

Kennedy Center’s annual Page to Stage Festival is always chock full of tempting offerings, and the challenge of deciding what to see is daunting. It’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet…except you really...

‘Fabulation’ Brings a Tale of Comic (and Cosmic) Comeuppance to Mosaic Theater Company of DC

Although it sounds serious on the surface, Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine, is one of the funniest plays ever to grace a DC stage. That’s the opinion of my colleague, John...

Review: ‘Fabulation’ at Mosaic Theater Is an Outright Joy

It takes a certain talent to turn topics that are no laughing matter into laugh-out-loud comedy that doesn’t condescend, doesn’t ridicule, and yet imbues life with meaning as only art can. That kind...

Magic Time!: The Mind-Blowing Stagecraft in ‘Twisted Melodies’ at Mosaic Theater

Twisted Melodies is a spectacular finish to Mosaic’s fourth season. Written by and starring Kelvin Roston, Jr., the show sweeps us into Donny Hathaway’s world of magnificent music-making and mental...

Review: ‘Twisted Melodies’ at Mosaic Theater Company

A foreboding, wide-open hotel window overlooking the Manhattan night skyline beckons you to enter the tender interior space of ’70s soul singer, composer and recording artist, Donny Hathaway. Twisted...

Review: ‘Sooner/Later’ at Mosaic Theater Company

A rom-com about manhunting…at Mosaic? That’s probably not the sort of fare you’d expect from DC’s preeminent theatrical platform for social-justice programming. But who is to say that fair should have...

Magic Time: ‘Les Deux Noirs: Notes on Notes of a Native Son’ at Mosaic Theater Company

The splashy opening is spectacularly preconception-smashing. We know we’re about to see a play premised on a 1953 meeting in a Paris café between the literary lion Richard Wright and James Baldwin,...

Review: ‘Les Deux Noirs: Notes on Notes of a Native Son’ at Mosaic Theater Company

In Les Deux Noirs: Notes on Notes of a Native Son, Playwright Psalmayene 24, Director Raymond O. Caldwell, and Founding Artistic Director Ari Roth take on the risky task of staging a well-known and...

Who Gets To Feel Safe? A Conversation Inspired by Mosaic’s ‘Native Son’

Theater and Policy Salon partners with New York University Washington Center to organize a conversation on “Who Gets to Feel Safe?” in conjunction with Mosaic Theater Company’s productions of Native...

Magic Time!: ‘Native Son’ at Mosaic Theater Company

When one has an overwhelming experience in the theater—as I did watching Native Son at Mosaic—it can take some time to process. This is especially so if the work is unlike anything one thought...

Director and Playwright Psalmayene 24 Discusses ‘Native Son’ and ‘Les Deux Noirs’

DC Theater Arts caught up with Director and Playwright Psalmayene 24 to discuss Native Son and Les Deux Noirs: Notes on Notes of a Native Son, which play in rep at the Mosaic Theater this month....

Review: ‘Native Son’ at Mosaic Theater

We usually think of a rat as a detestable lowlife animal that we dread. It slinks in dark corners of the floor, hiding itself from being seen. It nervously darts and runs when spotted and can fit...

Review: ‘SHAME 2.0 (With Comments From the Populace)’ at Mosaic Theater Company

“You have to be a good Arab,” says Morad Hassan of the stigma he faces trying to have a career as an Arab actor in Israel—the very country where, he says, “we are the Jews of the Jews.” “FREE...

Is God Dead? Or Just Depressed, Lonely and Fed Up With Humankind?

The verdict is in. God is not dead. And rumors of his death, to paraphrase Mark Twain, have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the deity—He, She or That Which Transcends All Else—is alive and well at...

Review: ‘Oh, God’ at Mosaic Theater Company

Theater and theology have been boon companions for eons. Ever since religion was invented, humans have wanted divinities with drama. Way back in polytheistic antiquity, playgoers imagined gods as...

Review: ‘The Agitators’ at Mosaic Theater Company

“Do you still believe there can be a country for all?” When that blunt question comes up in The Agitators—Mat Smart’s deeply affecting play about the friendship between Susan B. Anthony and Frederick...

Review: ‘Marie and Rosetta’ at Mosaic Theater Company

I could well make this a one-word review: Wow. After the sensational opening of Marie and Rosetta at Mosaic last night, wow was the first word I heard from everyone I talked to, and wow was the first...

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...

Review: ‘The Vagrant Trilogy’ at Mosaic Theater Company

The vagrant of the title is a Palestinian scholar named Adham who, while on a trip to London as a grad student, must decide, when war breaks out in his homeland, whether to stay or go. Will he remain...

Review: ‘Hooded, or Being Black for Dummies’ by Mosaic Theater Company

In today’s political climate, discussions of race and privilege between those with opposing views have become near to impossible. Our battles of conflicting perspectives, opinions, and impassioned...

Living Dolls: A Conversation With the Five Actors Who Breathe Life Into ‘Paper Dolls’ at Mosaic

Paper Dolls, the bittersweet new musical that opened at Mosaic Theater Company two weeks ago, has produced standing ovations—and laughter and tears—at every production so far. Yet the show, which...

Review: ‘Paper Dolls’ at Mosaic Theater Company

From start to finish, Paper Dolls is a wildly entertaining and unapologetic dramedy filled with biting contradictions, provocative imagery, and endearing characters that you can’t help but root for....

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...