The annual Logan Festival of Solo Performances is underway — and once again, it’s an end-of-summer delight and respite from the heat and humidity at the recently remodeled 1st Stage in Tysons, Virginia. I’ve covered this festival several times over the years. This year, two of the three proved that solo performances are among the best antidotes to these distracted times — it’s you and the actor, and that’s all one needs to feel connected to the theatrical world, to the world at large.
Baron Vaughn: Cycle Breaker
Baron Vaughn, actor, writer, and director, is best known for his role as Bud on the Netflix original series, Grace & Frankie, which stars Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. But he needs no other stars in this insightful performance that delves into being the child of an alcoholic mother, a new father, and a performer. As he shares, he always wanted to be the center of attention, and he earns it in Baron Vaughn: Cycle Breaker, directed by Aysan Celik, with a big-hearted performance
At the show’s heart is a reunion with his childhood monster: his mother. It’s been five years since Vaughn has seen his mother. Her arrival makes him recall in often heartbreaking detail his childhood of neglect and abuse by his mother in North Las Vegas.
Yet, the very best moments in this time-traveling play, one that is layered and deep with nuance, are when he describes being there for the birth of his two sons, his first, after 50 hours of labor, and the second, which happened much more quickly, in his house. It’s a mix of humor and pathos that brings us into the very meaning of what it means to be a father, especially after having been abandoned by his own father. Vaughn is determined to break the cycle of neglect with his two sons — and be there.
The time-traveling aspect is highlighted by Adam Mendelson’s superb lighting design on stage, bare except for a door and wood block. The lighting subtly indicates time and mood shifts and gives us a needed beat to process the trauma with the actor. “Time travel is real. It’s called trauma,” notes Vaughn as the lighting blinks or flashes, as the actor moves toward understanding and forgiveness.
Baron Vaughn: Cycle Breaker is a beautiful, courageous portrait of a middle-aged father confronting his hurtful past, and ultimately, vowing to move forward with hope and joy.
Running Time: 90 minutes, no intermission. Tuesday, August 25 at 7:30 pm; Saturday, August 29 at 5:00 pm; Sunday, August 30 at 7:30 pm
Let It Be Art! Harold Clurman’s Life of Passion
“What’s wrong with the theater today? People are afraid. They are afraid to have courage,” notes Harold Clurman, one of American theater’s most influential critics and directors, as depicted by Ronald Rand in Let It Be Art! Harold Clurman’s Life of Passion. In the 1930s, Clurman co-founded the acting company the Group Theatre with Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford, and through 1980, he directed more than 40 influential Broadway productions.
In this solo play, written and performed by Ronald Rand, Clurman is also an inveterate name-dropper. These names once resonated, once graced gossip columns by the likes of Cindy Adam and Liz Smith. Today, even a theater audience of a certain age must sift through yesteryear nostalgia to recall them.
From modest roots in New York City’s Lower East Side, Clurman studied at the Sorbonne, and his roommate was none other than the soon-to-be-great American composer Aaron Copland. Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler (whom he was married to for 20 years), the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy, Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, Clifford Odets, Eli Kazan, and Marlon Brando — this 70-minute play crisscrosses the artists, writers, and actors of a bygone era. The play’s conceit that Clurman is dictating an essay on theater to an unseen assistant — is soon lost.
It’s all surface stuff here, though done with panache as he wiles in and out in his signature cape, cane, and fedora.
Rand has performed this production for the past 26 years in over 30 countries, and it’s worth seeing, especially if you delight in hearing and remembering these boldfaced names spoken once more. I just yearned for this performance to say more about the human condition of a man who rose from New York’s impoverished Lower East Side to be at the center of American theater. I yearned to see that courage.
Running Time: 70 minutes, no intermission. Friday, August 28 at 7:30 pm; Saturday, August 29 at 2:00pm; Sunday, August 30 at 5:00 pm
It Ends with Guinea Pigs
It Ends with Guinea Pigs, written and performed by Diana Gitelman and directed by Faline England, is a brave performance. Gitelman is a modern wife and mother to cheer for — imperfect, insecure, but determined to do the best she can for two guinea pigs, named Casper and Jasper, that she has promised her young daughter.
Apparently, guinea pigs make terrible pets. On the guinea pig rescue website in Los Angeles, there is even a warning to that effect. However, Gitelman wants to create for her daughter, “a yes world … even though I have the Russian heart of a ‘no’ mom.”
Gitelman, a first-generation American, a product of the former Soviet Union, of two striving Jewish parents, is also trying to break a cycle, though hers is one of endlessly high standards, of perfectionism that is driving her crazy as a mother. And now, she has two high-maintenance guinea pigs to care for on top of being a frontline parent and an actress with a budding television career.
(On the other hand, this perfectionist drive must serve her well in her professional life — It Ends with Guinea Pigs won Best One-Woman Show at the United Solo Theatre Festival in New York and recently enjoyed a sold-out run at the Elysian Theater in Los Angeles, but that is not the point of this solo performance.)
On the stage, bare except for a stool, she is a depleted, exhausted American mom at odds with all the demands that she places on herself.
Recounting vivid recollections of a lonely childhood, she realizes that she must learn to say “yes” to herself, to her self-care — and to the guinea pigs.
I wanted this play to go even deeper. In one moment, it does — when she recalls the death of her Babushka, her dear grandmother and primary caregiver. Gitelman lets silence seep across the stage. The schtick of being a perfect Los Angeles mom falls away. The silence says more than the words.
It Ends with Guinea Pigs is a less nuanced and layered production than Baron Vaughn’s Cycle Breaker, but I would urge you, if you can, to see both — two young parents from widely different backgrounds — each trying to break generational trauma, each trying to be the best parent that they can in America today, to set their children on paths different than their own childhoods, and each having no roadmap — only warmth, humor, and inspiring moments of revelation and hope.
Running Time: 80 minutes, no intermission. Wednesday, August 26 at 7:30 pm; Thursday, August 27 at 7:30 pm; Saturday, August 29 at 7:30 pm; Sunday, August 30 at 2:00 pm
One last shout-out: at all three performances, there was an Audra Jacobs. They are the connectivity director at 1st Stage, and a delightful pre-show presence who sets the vibe and reminds us that theater is personal, best experienced without distraction, and that we are here for one another, connected.
The Logan Festival of Solo Performances plays through August 30, 2026, at 1st Stage, 1524 Spring Hill Road/Tysons, VA. For complete details, see the Full Logan Festival Schedule 2026. General admission tickets are $20 per show and $10 per show for students, educators, or military with valid ID. Festival passes are also available for $36 (one ticket to each of the three shows) or $72 (two tickets to each of the three shows). Individual tickets and festival passes can be purchased online, by emailing the 1st Stage box office at boxoffice@1ststage.org, or by calling the box office at 703.854.1856.
The festival program is online here.
SEE ALSO:
1st Stage announces 2026 Logan Festival of Solo Performance (news story, August 2, 2026)
