Recommended by Ian Thal

  • paper backs
    11 Dec. 2021
    A writer and a painter imagine all the possible futures they may have together and apart, becoming the subject and the absence in each other's art. Both evocative and elegiac.
  • Blue
    11 Dec. 2021
    A marathon swimmer's stream-of-consciousness in which a recent health scare, age, and the economic uncertainty that comes from lifetime of unconventional choices, provoke as much anxiety as a jellyfish's venomous tentacle.
  • Neverlanding
    11 Dec. 2021
    Zeitler reimagines John Barrie's Peter Pan as magical-realist exploration of Mike Darling's trauma as both a brother with unanswered questions about his sister's mental illness, and as a veteran whose wingman and lover died in his arms during a sneak attack. A great piece for solo performers.
  • Birds of North America
    26 Nov. 2021
    The seasons pass and climate change makes the autumns warmer and warmer, altering the migration patterns of the birds, fueling the slow burn between father and daughter. What begins as light comedy in Moench's hands may avoid tragedy, but ends in elegy. I reviewed Birds of North America for Washington City Paper: https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/540057/a-flock-of-feelings-in-birds-of-north-america/
  • "N"
    26 Nov. 2021
    Though our sympathies align with Charles Gilpin, Pender has crafted a layered and nuanced double portrait of both Gilpin and Eugene O'Neill. The power imbalance of race and money is always present, both artists are dedicated to their craft, believers in the social value of their art, convinced that they know best, and both high-functioning alcoholics, yet their mutual respect and admiration for each other’s artistry feeds into their mutual neediness for respect and admiration, bringing them together and setting up the eventual clash. I reviewed N for Washington City Paper: https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/538906/n-offers-a-nuanced-look-at-charles-sydney-gilpin-eugene-oneill/
  • RED BIKE
    26 Nov. 2021
    A poetic stream-of-consciousness ride through a former industrial town on the boundary between rural and suburban America as it is transformed by real estate speculation and the developing fulfillment center economy as seen by an eleven year-old kid whose brand new red bike has given them freedom to roam further than ever before. I interviewed Caridad Svich for Washington City Paper:
    https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/537070/red-bike-breathes-new-life-into-local-theater/
  • Zero Hour
    20 Sep. 2021
    Equal parts an absurdist fable with talking animals and a paranoid military satire. Fans of Stanley Kubrick & Terry Southern's script for "Doctor Strangelove" or Firesign Theatre's "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers" will enjoy.
  • Misfortune (a ten minute play)
    19 Sep. 2021
    A dark comedy about fate, and coincidence, chance, and (possible) vengeance, and the mysteries that connect a table at a small Chinese restaurant the factory where fortune cookies are made. It's fun and suspenseful, with joke after joke even as the tension continues to ratchet up to the conclusion.
  • Seeking Nietzsche (Full-length play)
    31 Aug. 2021
    Eppich-Harris dramatizes not just Friedrich Nietzsche's efforts to break from 19th century orthodoxy as a philosophical provocateur, but the subsequent fights over what his philosophy means, personified by the struggle between his estranged friend, the intellectual Lou Andreas-Salomé, and his literary executor and estranged sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche who in pursuing her own political will-to-power was in the decades following his death reshaped his public image into a philosopher of something he despised: a philosopher of German nationalism. Eppich-Harris' writing is lyrical, psychologically complex, and ultimately political.
  • Time Is On Our Side
    25 Aug. 2021
    Thomas’ script is intimately epic, recreating a Philadelphia that is vivid even for those who have not spent a day there in many years, in which queer millennial characters have messy reactions as they discover just how little they know of the history of gay and lesbian life before the AIDS crisis, before Stonewall, in a city that is neither New York nor San Francisco, when “queer” was still exclusively a slur, when the closet was often the safest choice even for people who knew exactly who they were and whom they loved.

    https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/528916/in-time-is-on-our-side-recreating-the-past-isnt-easy/

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