Magic Time!: On Acting with a Conscience: A Q&A with Lianne...
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...
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...
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...
Magic Time!: Mike Daisey’s 18-Part, 30-Hour ‘A People’s History’ at Seattle...
I remember being so bored by my high school American history class that I got a D in it. This was not normal. My...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
Magic Time!: Actor Michael Kevin Darnall Opens Up About Being Open...
When Michael Kevin Darnall plays a character who is the focus of a long scene and we can watch every nuance and shading of...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...