Recommended by Ian Thal

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.

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-b…

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-…

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-li…

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.

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.

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.

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-r…

Is Hell a region of concentric circles of poetic tortures as imagined by Dante or a sealed room shared with fellow misanthropes as imagined by Sartre? Whatever the geography, it's now administered by a corporate bureaucracy of banal lesser demons and minions offering stale baked goods and orientation packets!

A smart dark theological comedy on the subject of free-will. Dunne's devil has applied game theory to the human temptation to favor instant gratification over the future in a cosmological struggle between good and evil.