The opening scene of We, Tiresias poses what appears to be a simple question: What if you could text a couple of your former selves and meet them for a drink? What would you talk about? What would you wear? It goes without saying that most of us would do it if we could, just as most of us revisit places where we used to live to look for remnants. Most of us can think of former selves that we still like, and we suppose their company would be a pleasure for a while. Read More
Early in “An Iliad,” the minstrel says he hopes he never has to tell this story again, meaning, I suppose, he hopes audiences will finally outgrow battle lust and let him do some new material like “Song of Myself” or “Paradise Lost.” Later I think he hopes we’ll outgrow war itself, and thus release him from the fate of bearing witness through the ages. And by the end of the play I’m pretty sure the story harms him, diminishes him, takes another little piece of his heart every time. How much heart can he have left? Read More
The laughter during Saturday’s performance of The Santaland Diaries, by David Sedaris, wasn’t like most laughter at Blackfriars Playhouse: it burst out of people at peak intensity, with force that shook your seat and struck the middle of your body like a gust. And it stopped as quickly as it started, stopped dead — no transition, no recovery: utter stillness. Guffaw, guffaw, berserk guffaw, then silence Read More
There’s a moment in Once Upon A Christmas Carol that appears to be a mismatch. Phil Erickson, who plays Scrooge, is trying to hide from apparitions and regrets, those sisters. He has laid himself back down in his bed and covered his head with the quilts. Molly Warndorf, who plays the Ghost of Christmas Past, has to make him get up. Erickson is an accomplished, prodigious actor whose charisma tends to dominate the stage, and Warndorf is an eighth-grade girl who played a munchkin at Harmony Middle School once. Asking her to bully him would not appear to be a good idea. Read More
I left The Potomac School’s production of “Journey to the West” thinking about ideas, not about people — compelling ideas I wanted to remember. As soon as I got to my car, I wrote a few of them down:
“The obstacles on the journey to the western heavens are components of our own personality.”
Ain’t that the truth. Read More
The social commentary associated with SubUrbia, a play by Eric Bogosian that ran for five short nights last week at the Glaize Studio Theater, began when I called the box office to reserve a ticket. Before taking my credit card number, the manager warned me that the play contains nudity, profanity, and smoking. “It isn’t suitable for children,” she said. Placards on the doors of the theater repeated those warnings: nudity, profanity, mature content. Read More
If you passed the middle of middle age during the current economic recession, you can probably relate to Sidney Bruhl, the protagonist of Ira Levin’s play Deathtrap, which is onstage now at the Winchester Little Theater. Sidney’s best years are behind him, and he knows that, but he isn’t ready to accept it. He wrote two or three good plays when he was young, but now he is essentially unemployed; he and his wife would no longer qualify for decent tables at the better restaurants if she weren’t paying their way, so every meal humiliates him. Read More
Shenandoah Summer Music Theatre’s charming production of Peter Pan honors two traditions that help explain why Peter’s been around for 107 years: the actor who plays Peter is a woman, and the actor who plays Captain Hook, Peter’s arch-enemy, also plays Mr. Darling, the father of the girl Peter loves–or would love if he let himself grow up a little bit. Read More
“Am I crazy to do it this way?” McMath had asked me earlier, and I had assured her that she wasn’t crazy, that “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was meant to be staged outdoors on a midsummer night. It is, after all, a play about semi-human creatures who live in the woods and prey on people who stray from safer places into haunted forests, people like all of us sitting under the tent and gazing out into the darkness, which scares us a little, despite our rationality. Read More
On July 15, before opening the second show of its fifty-first season, The Wayside Theater paused to remember the man who gave the company its name and its building and to thank three men who have helped the theater flourish in recent years. Read More
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