For all the apologizing going around, it seems clear that even the Councilmembers that cast the votes to move Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6) off the Transportation and Public Works Committee aren't so sure of themselves. more ›

There’s a huge star at the center of the Sydney Theatre Company’s much-hyped, Liv Ullman-directed, wholly satisfying new staging of A Streetcar Named Desire, which sold out its Kennedy Center run before the curtain rose on the first preview. I speak, of course, of the dramatist Tennessee Williams. more ›

Hoo, boy -- if you thought that it had already been a laborious weekend for Metro, you ain't seen nothing yet. WMATA isn't taking too kindly to the Post's big report this morning, an expose about the previous failures of Metrorail's much-maligned crash avoidance system. The Post's report leads with a terrifying story about a 2005 incident in which not two, but three trains' avoidance systems failed, and gut feelings were the only thing separating Metro from having a three-train, rush hour pileup between Rosslyn and Foggy Bottom, underneath the Potomac River: more ›

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A few years after Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld dominated network television with their “show about nothing,” Tom Stoppard astonished the theater with a play about everything. More specifically, the mathematical conceits that govern the ultimate predictability of everything. Or don’t. Learned opinion varies about the math. more ›

It’s already a cliché – or perhaps a symptom of our diseased, decaying age - that getting shot is nowadays regarded as a smart career move (see Curtis James Jackson III, DBA Fifty Cent). Time was, if a young buck wanted to make a name for himself, he had to kill somebody. more ›

Antony and Cleopatra is a sprawling, lumbering beast of a play — war, international intrigue, doomed love — but the best stuff in the Shakespeare Theatre’s current production is the smallest stuff: he-said/she-said, jealousy, drunkenness. When Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, learns from a rightly mortified messenger that Antony, the Roman General with whom she’s been engaged in a forbidden and yet very public love affair, has married (for the second time), she demands a description of the bride. “What majesty was in her gait?” more ›

The notion that writers in Hollywood are lazy, disposable crybabies has been a stock type for decades – just ask the guys and gals outside the studio gates with the clever picket signs. But in the theater, playwrights are revered. A new company in town is taking big steps to help emerging dramatists refine their voices -- while at the same time, demystifying for audiences just how it is that a “well-made play” gets, well, made. more ›