More Plays About Gatherings and Food: (Half of)The Apple Family Plays, reviewed.

View fullsize

Ted van Griethuysen, Elizabeth Pierotti, Sarah Marshall, Kimberly Schraf, and Rick Foucheux inThat Hopey Changey Thing. (Photo: Teddy Wolff)

The Studio Theatre has two of Richard Nelson's four Apple Family Plays, the last of which had its world premiere at the Public Theater in New York only last Friday, in repertory. The two at Studio are That Hopey Change Thing and Sweet and Sad. My review of both is on Arts Desk now, and will show up in print in next week's City Paper. Happy Thanksgiving.

(Invasion) Hit Parade: Elvis Costello at Lisner Auditorium, annotated.

Elvis Costello at Lisner Auditorium, Friday, Nov. 22, 2013. (Francis Chung for DCist)

Has it really been more than two years since I last saw Elvis Costello play and felt compelled to write footnotes, basically, on all the curiosities in the set? The calendar does not lie. I've seen Costello perform probably 20 times since 1999, but I'd never seen him do a headlining solo set, as he did Friday night at Lisner Auditorium.

Because no one demanded it, I posted some notes over at DCist, where it's been so long that I don't even have my own login anymore. The post features great photos by Francis Chung, who took the one above. For an overview of the concert, the great and good Dave McKenna captured it well in his Washington Post review.

Darkness on the Edge of Town: The Woman in Black, reviewed.

Matthew Keenan & Robert Leembruggen in The Woman in Black. (Cameron Whitman)

Matthew Keenan gets scared. (Cameron Whitman)

Robert Leembruggen (Cameron Whitman)

I quite liked Keegan Theatre's production of Susan Hill and Stephen Mallatratt's ghost story The Woman in Black. No arts section in this week's City Paper, so my review is web-only.

Kinky Reboots: Mies Julie and Bondage, reviewed.

View fullsize

Hilda Cronje and Bongile Mantsai in Mies Julie. (Rodger Bosch)

My reviews of Mies Julie, a South African August Strindberg update, and Bondage, a 1992 David Henry Hwang play from locals Pinky Swear Productions, are in today's Washington City Paper.

While their origins and scale differ, it's useful to compare the productions to one another. Both plays use the sexual negotiations of an interracial couple as means of discussing the troubled racial histories of their native lands.

Bondage reminded me of David Ives' Venus in Fur, while Mies Julie recalled uncomfortably a slavery-era exploitation flick from 1975 called Mandingo that's come up lately in discussions of Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave. I don't imagine that's what adapter-director Yael Farber was going for, but nothing exists in a vacuum.  Anyway, read.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Appropriates His Past

 (Darrow Montgomery/WCP)

My profile of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, whose play Appropriate opens at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company tomorrow night, is in today's Washington City Paper. He says he's rewritten it since I saw its premiere at the Humana Festival of New American Plays last April, so I'm curious to see what's changed.  

Read all about it.

The Scarlet A(s): Inventing Van Gogh and The Argument, reviewed.

Lawrence Remond & Ryan Tumulty in Inventing Van Gogh. (C. Stanley Photography)

In today's Washington City Paper, I review two shows I mostly liked: Washington Stage Guild's Inventing Van Gogh and Theater J's The Argument.

You are alerted.

Spoilers on the Radio

Baby daddy. (Shhh.)

The New Hampshire Public Radio Word of Mouth show talked to me earlier this week for a short segment on my Four Types of Spoilers essay for The Village Voice. 

You can listen to that here and read the essay here.