Recommended by Ian Thal

Like Jack London's novel, Einhorn's adaptation contains a critique of capitalism's abuses, but the framing device of a historian-propagandist working with an ensemble of actor/musicians in the far-future to reenact a showdown between socialist workers and an increasingly repressive oligarchy called "The Iron Heel" leaves us wondering if the utopian Brotherhood of Man that comes centuries later is as it presents itself.

A grotesquely satirical tale about quack doctor, fortune hunter, demagogue, and media mogul, JR Brinkley, that draws strong parallels with the demagoguery, nativist populism, xenophobia, and pseudo-scientific attacks on medicine that fuel today's politics and give certain figures their power. Einhorn's storytelling is smart, funny, and a scary reminder that the culture wars are nothing new.

The "ancient Venice" of Einhorn's "Shylock and the Shakespeareans" is a savvily anachronistic fun-house mirror of our own time, drawing parallels between the rhetorical tropes of Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice", and the racial and conspiracy theories of today's political extremists. It also explores the precariousness of Diaspora Jewry caught between embracing identity or assimilation into the majority culture. All delivered with clever satire and dystopian horror.

In "Ada and the Engine", Gunderson makes both the intimate friendships between Lovelace and Babbage (progenitors of the not yet named field of computer science) and their efforts to imagine the marvelous possibilities of steam-powered brass-and-steel brains palpable. A truly fascinating portrait of two lives whose significance to our world would not be fully appreciated for over a century: Indeed it was Lovelace's insights that presage we can use machines to exchange plays!

I reviewed Avant Bard's 2022 production: https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/551717/ghost-in-the-machine-ada…...

Tiffany Antone's "Twigs and Bone" is a vividly crafted naturalistic horror story, as Moira, the protagonist returns home to a mother and father, both pathological hoarders, both repeating an endless cycle of tormenting one another over the trauma of the child they lost decades prior. Were they always like this? Antone evokes fairytales and folklore, but grounds the story in the visceral world of life, death, bodily functions, decay, and psychopathology. I reviewed the 2022 NuSass production: https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/556169/twigs-bone-brings-the-su…

It is not enough that D.W. Gregory has crafted a drama in which the gift a remarkably long and accurate memory could mark one for state terror, in which a scientific paper could arouse political concerns that risk sending the investigator to the Gulag, in which even the act of rehabilitation is not without risk, it's that she has imbued this historical drama set in the time between Stalin and Khrushchev with the vibrant language of its synesthetic subject. I reviewed the 2022 Washington Stage Guild production: https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/556820/a-story-within-a-story-m…...

Latham's "Yella Jack" is a richly rendered portrait of Memphis during the 1878 Yellow Fever epidemic. Her characters come from different races and classes, religious traditions, speak different dialects, and have different means of tending to the dead and dying, yet, whether they realize it or not, are in it together. A terrific ensemble piece for actors with Latham's usual attention to language and character, but also a worthy challenge for an imaginative director and design team.

A hilarious satire of the commodification of improv comedy and all the pent-up resentments and accretion of artistic ruts that can cause creative partnerships to melt down.

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.

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.