Fight Call: On the Welders' new MMA play The Girl in the Red Corner

Audrey Bertaux and Jennifer J. Hopkins grapple in rehearsal for The Girl in the Red Corner. (Photo: Darrow Montgomery)

Today's Washington City Paper has a feature from me about a new play from the DC theatre collective The Welders set in the milieu of mixed martial arts. It's by Stephen Spotswood, a prolific dramatist whose work I have followed with interest for the last five years or so, and it's the first play about a bloodsport here in DC since Studio Theatre did Sucker Punch in early 2012. (I did a feature on that one, too.) You can use the link above, or pick up a dead-tree copy wherever finer alt-weeklies are given away for free.

Epic-in-the-Brechtian-Sense Failure: Kiss, reviewed.

Lelia TahaBurt, Shannon Dorsey, Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey, Tim Getman, and Ahmad Kamal in Kiss. 

Feeling compelled to write a play about war or genocide? You've got your work cut out for you, but God bless. Feel compelled to turn your frustration over how hard it is to write a good play about war or genocide into a play? Please stop. A lot of things are about you, but not everything.

Woolly Mammoth's American premiere of Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón's Kiss is not as bad as Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present, because nothing I've ever seen on a stage is as myopic and offensive as Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present. But it ain't good. I break it down in today's Washington City Paper, available wherever finer alt-weeklies are given away gratis.

The Heaven Over New York: Angels in America, Part I: Millennium Approaches and Angels in America, Part II: Perestroika, reviewed.

Mitchell Hébert and Jon Hudson Odom in Perestroika. (Danisha Crosby)

Lemme tell ya, people: It was much easier to figure out why Tony Kusher's most recent play is lousy than it was to try to figure out why Angels in America, the epic masterpiece that shall be his legacy, is so good. You have countless other, more reputable sources on that, of course. I was just writing about the show's latest and largest local revival, the product of a Marvel Team-Up between Olney Theatre Center and Round House Theatre.

While researching this review I discovered that Mike Nichols' 2003 HBO miniseries of Angels in America earned four-stars-out-of-four for its artistic merit and four-for-four for its depiction of the nursing profession on the website The Truth About Nursing.

FURTHER READING: Here's my review of the 2011 revival of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, which came to Arena Stage four years ago. It was the first major play to address the AIDS crisis, and it was written from inside the trenches with shells exploding all around. Which is at least one of the reasons it hasn't had (in my opinion) the afterlife the more contemplative and mythic Angels, written several years afterward, has had. (Twelve years elapsed between Angels' premiere and its emergence as an HBO miniseries; for The Normal Heart to go from the stage to HBO took 29 years.)

Once again, Isaac Butler and Dan Kois' mighty oral history of Angels in America—soon to be expanded to book-length!—is here, and highly recommended.

Bad Times, Good Times: Studio's Cloud 9 and Constellation's Urinetown, reviewed.

For various critic-related, theater company-related, and publication-related reasons, my reviews of Studio Theatre's production of Caryl Churchill's anticolonial sex romp Cloud 9 and Constellation Theatre Company's new production of the Y2K-era Greg Kotis-Mark Hollman musical Urinetown have taken a long time to see print. But they're in this week's Washington City Paper, and online, too.

All that (Inventor of) Jazz: Jelly's Last Jam and The Lonesome West, reviewed.

Jelly's Last Jam, a celebrated but rarely-revived musical biography of seminal jazz artist Jelly Roll Morton.

My reviews of Signature Theatre's new production of George C. Wolfe and Susan Brikenhead's early-90s Jelly Roll Morton bio-musical Jelly's Last Jam, and Keegan Theatre's production of Martin McDonagh's late-90s black comedy The Lonesome West, are in today's Washington City Paper.  Notice is served.

Be Brief, I See into Thy End: Fear, reviewed.

Vince Eisenson, Matthew Alan Ward, Seamus Miller, and Amal Saade in Fear.

I had the good fortune to interview Star Trek's resident alien linguist Marc Okrand this week, for a video that'll posting next week as part of Air & Space / Smithsonian's coverage of Trek's 50th birthday. I met Marc through his involvement in DC theatre. After the shoot, we got some coffee and talked about—well, okay, yes, about his work on various Trek movies mostly, again, some more. But we also discussed how much we both enjoyed writer/director Kathleen Akerley's ambitious new play FEAR, which I review in this week's Washington City Paper.

For evidence of just how pear-shaped the genre of plays-about-playmaking can go, consider Jackie Sibbles Drury’s unaccountably popular We Are Proud to Present…, a story about a half-dozen actors working to “devise” a play about a historic tragedy of which they know nothing. Though it’s meant to look improvised, it’s fully scripted, and the it's the single worst play I’ve ever seen in my professional or biological life. Akerley's play needs a revision, but it ducks the self-absorption that makes Drury's so, so insufferable.

Sock Pulpit: Hand to God, reviewed.

Liam Forde is affixed to a demonic puppet in Studio's Hand to God. (Amy Horan)

My review of Studio Theatre's terrific production of Robert Askins' Broadway hit Hand to God is in today's Washington City Paper.

Dealer's Choice: The Trump Card, reviewed.

Mike Daisey performs The Last Cargo Cult at Woolly Mammoth in 2010 (Stan Barouh).

This took a few days longer to appear than it should've, for boring reasons only partly within my control. Anyway, last Friday I attended a workshop of a new monologue by Mike Daisey — an artist I've written a lot over the last six or seven years. I didn't find room in the piece to mention that the monologue was directed by Isaac Butler, who has been doing some terrific writing on the theatre for Slate. The oral history of Angels and America that he and my sometimes-editor Dan Kois posted this week is marvelous piece of historical journalism. Anyway, my Washington City Paper review of the still-developing The Trump Card is (finally) here.