Next season at Arena Stage, more than half of the playwrights and directors will be represented by women and people of color; two exciting collaborations will take place with Denver Center Theatre Company and Hartford Stage; and there will be stories of politics and power… Read More
If you’ve ever read The Grapes of Wrath you’re familiar with the Joad family. Some of the fictional family migrated from Oklahoma to California for new opportunities during and after the Dust Bowl. But if you read the book, you’ll remember that Cali wasn’t the oasis… Read More
Right now at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater it’s the summer of 1899, and the newsboys of New York City are about to take on two of the most powerful men in the country — Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst — and win.… Read More
Who among us hasn’t wanted to erase something silly, stupid, or even scandalous that they did in the past? What about those things that have been written about you online that are harmful, but perhaps not even accurate or taken out of context? If only… Read More
Jitney, by powerhouse playwright August Wilson, is the kind of play you should go see cold. Seriously, stop reading this review now, and go buy tickets to Arena’s Stage’s human, heartbreaking and hilarious portal into the authenticity of quotidian black life. Wilson’s magnificent script pulls… Read More
If you walk by Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater this month between 8-10PM you might feel your soul elevate if the stirring harmony of the Fisk Jubilee Singers leaks through the doors of Kreeger Theater into the night. World-premiere musical Jubilee, written… Read More
If Gordon Gecko took up playwriting in prison, Junk is the play he would pen (in the pen). Directed with a tireless foot on the accelerator by Jackie Maxwell, Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar’s (Disgraced) rapid-fire script offers an unflinching post mortem on the origins of debt… Read More
Despite its hip title, JQA at the Arena Stage Arlene and Robert Kogod Cradle at the Mead Center for American Theater is not Hamilton 2.0 – the John Quincy Adams Story (1767-1848). Playwright and director Aaron Posner’s world premiere has the freshness of Lin Manuel Miranda,… Read More
The Heiress is a classic play, based on the Henry James novel Washington Square. It’s not the type of play we’ve typically seen from Arena Stage lately, so even its melodrama is refreshing, while still offering a strong message to modern audiences. Seema Sueko directs an… Read More
Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater’s production of Kleptocracy is a mashup of absurdist Russian poetry, SNL-style Putin spoofing, and Dostoyevsky-level discourse on the human condition. Reflective of today’s headlines, rather than a historical account, playwright Kenneth Lin has styled Kleptocracy as an origin story to… Read More
