Sleeping Giant’s Cosmic Horror Is Just Outside the Door
Every Halloween season, many theater companies embrace horror. But unlike last year, Rorschach Theatre isn’t offering the traditional vampires, ghouls, and zombies. With its staging of Steve Yockey’s Sleeping Giant, it evokes cosmic horror, a genre most closely associated with H.P. Lovecraft and defined by a nihilistic cosmos inhabited by ancient, eldritch intelligences of great…
Keegan Celebrates Halloween with Spooky (Not Scary) Woman in Black
There’s something a little spooky (but not scary) about the 1700 stretch of Church Street NW. Maybe it’s the closed-in nature of the block, bounded by 18th Street on one side and Stead Park on the other. Or its narrowness exacerbated by the old trees that loom overhead. Or the last stone vestige of the…
How the District Became William Shakespeare’s American Home
Washington, D.C., has been called many things over the centuries, from swamp to asylum, from the District of Crime to Dream City. While these descriptions are debatable, there’s one adjective so obvious it might come as a surprise: Shakespearean. “We have per capita more Shakespeare in this city than in any other city in the…
Folger’s Romeo and Juliet Bites Its Thumb at Love in New Staging
“This R&J is not a love story.” That’s a bold declaration for what is arguably the world’s most famous romantic tale, and likely sacrilege to the very William Shakespeare traditionalists who gleefully trot into the recently (and stunningly) renovated Folger Shakespeare Library for a date with the Bard. But in his program note for Romeo…
Babbitt: Mid by Midwest
It Can’t Happen Here is the Sinclair Lewis novel that imagines a fascist takeover of the United States by populist candidate promising to restore the nation to some vaguely defined idea of its former greatness. Like the European strongmen of its time (the book was published in 1935), Sinclair’s fictitious dictator-in-waiting, Senator “Buzz” Windrip, runs…
Marlene Doesn’t Quite Fill the Shoes of Hollywood’s Golden Age Star
“People remember the moments,” rather than the particulars of a performance, says the actor Marlene Dietrich in the play Marlene put on by ExPats Theatre. No one cares about the plot or performances of a movie (or a stage play), she claims, so long as the hero is able to capture her audience’s attention with…
Papa Ike, Do Preach in Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground
The theater lights dim. From the darkness, in voice-over, Dwight D. Eisenhower (John Rubinstein) recites the lofty words of his 1953 inaugural address: “My friends, before I begin, would you permit me the privilege of uttering a little private prayer of my own … Give us the power to discern clearly right from wrong ……
Mister Lincoln Affirms the Man Underneath the Legacy
What could be more meta, or more Washingtonian, than seeing a play about Abraham Lincoln performed at the site where he was infamously shot? Mister Lincoln played at Ford’s Theatre in 1980 and was brought back this season specifically to coincide with the election year. Watching the play, it’s impossible not to think of the…
Exception to the Rule is a Sucker Punch Examination of the School-to-Prison Pipeline
A half dozen empty desks sit beneath the funereal aura of fluorescent lights. A shrieking bell signals the end of the school day while a muffled intercom announcement reminds students to gather their bus passes, remember to exit through the rear of the building (thanks to newly installed metal detectors at the front entrance), and,…
The Show Goes On: Rebecca Medrano Shares Her Onstage Fall Favorites
You’ve probably seen the titan spirit behind GALA Hispanic Theatre during a show night. She’s the ginger-haired woman strutting down the halls and across the stage—usually in a sparkling dress and heels. Rebecca Medrano has been running one of the U.S.’s few Spanish- and Latin-focused theaters for nearly five decades. As big changes have unfolded…
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