Theater Alliance

In poetry and song, Theater Alliance’s ‘Chorus Within Her’ centers women

The performance is both a container for this period’s pain and loss and a meditation on what persists and resists.

‘Blackest Battle’ from Theater Alliance is a monumental accomplishment

Psalmayene 24’s graphic novel come to life is delightful in its form and harrowing in its emotional impact.

‘Blackest Battle’ from Theater Alliance promises a visual knockout

Filmed as half music video and half graphic-novel-come-to-life, Psalmayene 24’s hip-hop musical looks to be a stunner.

Theater Alliance to premiere Psalmayene 24’s hip-hop musical ‘The Blackest Battle’

A love story that calls attention to Black-on-Black gun violence, the film is half music video, half graphic-novel-come-to-life.

Jared Shamberger on the urgency of embracing ‘The B Word’

The third Welders playwrighting collective launches with a look at Black gay men and beauty.

New solo satire ‘Clowntime’ debuts at Dance Loft on 14

Playwright and performer John Feffer imagines an alternate universe where comedy is not only king but dictator.

A close look at ‘City in Transition,’ Theater Alliance’s love letter to DC

Transition as a noun means “the process or period of changing from one state to another.” As a verb it means “to undergo or cause to undergo a process or period of transition.” Both definitions, from...

Theater Alliance draws together four dramas from a disparate District

Continuing a season of online content, Theater Alliance presents the world premiere of City in Transition: The Quadrant Series. The full-length evening of digital theater, drawing inspiration from...

A year into COVID, how theater is changing maybe forever

At first, the shutdown of live theater came as a shock. Then, once artists were left to think quick on their feet, an extraordinary evolution began to happen. At the beginning of the coronavirus...

‘A Protest in Eight’ at Theater Alliance packs a social-justice punch

No doubt about it, in just fifteen minutes, protest theater can pack a powerful punch. Theater Alliance’s creatively ambitious A Protest in Eight, with its lineup of eight fierce young playwrights,...

Theater Alliance kicks off eight nights of protest plays

True to its mission—to present “socially conscious, thought-provoking work” that engages audiences “in active dialogue”—Theater Alliance has launched a series of eight short plays by eight emerging...

Theatermakers of color call white theater to account for systemic racism

The cultural momentum powering protests that followed the May 25 murder of George Floyd has galvanized a national and local movement for transformational change in American theater led by Black,...

‘Rasheeda Speaking’ is a ticking time bomb of workplace racial animus

Something struck me as incredulous about Rasheeda Speaking, a ticking time bomb about racial paranoia interlaced with the destructive power of office politics. But its recently deceased playwright...

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,...

The power of subversive design in ‘Day of Absence’ at Theater Alliance (Magic Time!)

To realize how much white America loved minstrelsy is a reckoning painful or shameful, depending on one’s ancestry. Minstrel shows were never meant for people of African descent to see; they were...

Review: Theater Alliance’s ‘Day of Absence’ by Douglas Turner Ward

Two clowns open a suitcase. In that suitcase lies a rope. A long rope. They start to play with it, tug-of-war stuff, with the loser pretending he’s winning. Lotsa yuks. Then the twist. And the painful...

Review: ‘Diagnosed’ at Theater Alliance

I know what it feels like to not want to take a shower for three days. I know how the aches and pains of depression make you crawl into the fetal position and want to close out the world. I am...

Magic Time!: ‘Blank’ at Theater Alliance

“There are holes in the script!” would be the deathblow for any more conventional work of theater, but in Nassim Soleimanpour’s Blank, the gaps are where the action’s at. As with Soleimanpour’s hugely...

Theater Alliance Announces Third Annual ‘Word Becomes Action Festival’

The third annual Word Becomes Action Festival launches Theater Alliance’s 2019-2020 season with six new works that ask us to confront the revolutions and moments of resilience within our daily lives....

Review: ‘Klytmnestra: An Epic Slam Poem’ at Theater Alliance

Dane Figueroa Edidi is one of DC’s most original and multitalented theater artists. A dancer, actor, poet, playwright, and choreographer, she is also a teacher, novelist, political commentator as well...

Review: ‘Blood at the Root’ at Theater Alliance

Raymond O. Caldwell kicks off his new Producing Artistic Directorship at Theater Alliance with a production of Dominque Morisseau’s Blood at the Root that is bursting with youthful exuberance,...

Raymond O. Caldwell Named Theater Alliance’s Next Producing Artistic Director

Theater Alliance announced today that Raymond O. Caldwell would be the company’s next producing artistic director. Caldwell currently serves as Theater Alliance’s Associate Artistic Director. He...

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...

Review: ‘The Events’ by Theater Alliance at the Anacostia Playhouse

A wrenching agitation pervades the gray clouded confines of The Events, in which a diverse chorus group is slaughtered by a gunman. Claire (Regina Aquino), the church chorus leader, is the sole...

Theater Alliance launches Season 16 with the Word Becomes Action Festival

Theater Alliance launches Season 16 with the Word Becomes Action Festival: Flipping the Script. Building on the success of last year’s inaugural festival, this second annual festival explores themes...

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...

Holly Bass Celebrates Black Sisterhood in ‘The Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company’

District-based solo performer Holly Bass creates in so many media and art forms I can’t keep up with her—and I’ve been covering her for nearly a decade. Her latest devised work, a dance-theater piece,...

Review: ‘Flood City’ at Theater Alliance

I would not have thought that a play about dreadful disaster could be done as a droll and delightfully dark comedy, but Playwright Gabrielle Reisman did. Having lived through Hurricane Katrina in 2005...

The Day My Great-Great-Grandfather Saved Frederick Douglass from a Probable “Lynching” by the U.S. Government Right After the Harper’s Ferry Raid

(DC Theater Arts is pleased to publish this remarkable first-person history on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s birth and Theater Alliance’s production of Idris Goodwin’s...

Review: ‘The Raid’ at Theater Alliance

Can social justice happen without militancy? Can ideals of equality become real without resort to violence? These questions gnaw at the mind during Theater Alliance’s powerfully eloquent staging of...

Magic Time!: Refinding the Soul of ‘Word Becomes Flesh’ at Theater Alliance: A Q&A With Director Psalmayene 24

Winner of five Helen Hayes Awards last season, Theater Alliance’s production of Word Becomes Flesh is now playing at Anacostia Playhouse in an encore presentation that is garnering even more acclaim....

Theater Alliance Launches Word Becomes Action Festival

By Natalie Graves Tucker The theater that brought you the Helen Hayes Award–winning show Word Becomes Flesh last year is walking the talk and following up with the Word Becomes Action Festival. Before...

News: ‘Olityelwe (The Forgotten)’ Returns to DC in Full Production for Two Performances Only at Theater Alliance

I reported on this extraordinary play when it was a staged reading at Theater J last June and said at the end: “Somebody needs to pick this one up and bring it back.” Well, that’s exactly what Theater...

Review: ‘Word Becomes Flesh’ at Theater Alliance at Anacostia Playhouse

The Word, in spiritual parlance, is the creative power of God made audible and visible through His Son. It is the energy of the divine dynamic made manifest through Self-revelation. True to principle,...

Theater Alliance Announces Its 2017-2018 Theater Season, Including Return of ‘Word Becomes Flesh’

Theater Alliance announces its 15th Season with an impressive lineup, including the return of its Helen Hayes Award–winning production Word Becomes Flesh, presented with two regional premieres by...

Magic Time!: ‘Still Life with Rocket’ at Theater Alliance as Voyage to a New Form: A Q&A with Director Mollye Maxner

Still Life With Rocket is greater than the sum of its arts. The diverse forms of installation, choreography, and character-driven drama come together in this collaboratively devised experience in what...

Review: ‘Still Life with Rocket’ at Theater Alliance

A few facts are laid at your feet as you move through a couple of simple rooms. Black and white video on old portable television shows a boxing match, which is no match for the clutter. A person...

Review: ‘Mnemonic’ at Theater Alliance

Just now when the world is wracked with wave upon wave of ethnic animus—just now when our country has succumbed to xenophobia not seen on these shores for decades—there comes a work of theatrical art...

Review: ‘Black Nativity’ at Theater Alliance

I saw Black Nativity last year at Anacostia Playhouse and was so thrilled by it (as I wrote in my rave review), I had to go again this year. I went expecting to see a reproduction of a splendid show...

Review: ‘brownsville song (b-side for tray)’ at Theater Alliance

Yesterday at The Anacostia Playhouse, the real world and the world onstage converged. It was like a communal emotion-meld through theater, the human heartbreak untold in too many headlines become the...

Magic Time! A Report on ‘Double X’ at Schools Without Walls

S. Ann Johnson’s Double X—an exquisitely crafted choreopoem exploring the multicultural distinctions and connections among seven women—had its DC debut Saturday after appearances in Baltimore, New...

Review #2: ‘Going to a Place Where You Already Are’ at Theater Alliance

The main reason I adore live theatre, in comparison to other art forms like cinema, is that the fiber and ligaments that make up this thing we call life – truth, in other words – is best experienced...

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....

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...

‘Black Nativity’ at Theater Alliance

If it is true that theater originated as worship and ritual—as a healing form of human communion with sacred mystery—then that history is surely raising the rafters of the Anacostia Playhouse these...

Magic Time!: Blown Away by a Bible Story Midway Through the Women’s Voices Theater Festival

To date I have been to 20 productions and one staged reading that are officially in DC’s Women’s Voices Theater Festival (11 of which I have written about for DCMetroTheaterArts), and I am booked to...

Women’s Voices Theater Festival: ‘Night Falls on the Blue Planet’ at Theater Alliance

Kathleen Akerley’s Night Falls on the Blue Planet is a rapturously funny and brainy comedy about a woman named Renee who is losing her mind and finding her body. (Or something like that. It’s...

Magic Time! ‘an awQward noise’

Who gets to say what in the theater has become an increasingly pressing question. Of course the question has been pressing for a long time; it’s just now getting paid significant attention by folks...

An Interview with Lori Muhlstein on Directing ‘The Meeting’ Playing This Friday, July 24-August 1, 2015 at The Clifton Town Hall

The Meeting is an original play by local playwright Greg Powell and directed by Lori Muhlstein. It will be performed by The Clifton Arts Council on Friday and Saturday evenings, July 24th, 25th, 31st...