Jonathon Church as the Marquis de Sade in Forum Theatre's Marat/Sade. Photo by Melissa Blackall. Asylum director Coulmier personally welcomes you as you step into the septic green confines of the bathhouse at Charenton, silently congratulating yourself on the liberal Enlightenment values that have brought you here to watch Coulmier’s lunatics perform a history-play penned by his most notorious patient, Donatien Alphonse François de Sade. It’s therapy, for them and for him, this playacting.......

You know John Hefner, even if you don’t know him. He’s a total geek — a costume-dressing, trivia-spouting, shows-Ravenous-to-all-his-first-dates geek. I mean that in a friendly, even admiring way. He seems to be under the impression that his geekdom is an out-of-control malady that exacerbates his dating woes, but really now. We live in the Age of Geeks. The jock-jerk in the White House is as despised as any U.S. president has ever been. Those......

“Always keep your bowler on in times of stress. And watch out for diabolical masterminds.” -- “Talented amateur” British TV super-spy Mrs. Emma Peel, to her debonair and refined partner in espionage, John Steed, 1967. Sound advice. Before John Steed, of course, Charle Chaplin’s most famous character, The Tramp, wore a bowler, and Rene Magritte appropriated the bowler-as-surrealist-emblem around the same time Steed was partnered up with the future Pussy Galore. You can add to......

It’s sometimes poetic. It’s sometimes haunting. It’s consistently, well, long. A hard sell, ’tis, this Portia Coughlin. Marina Carr 's allusive, surreal, and ultimately turgid play gets its D.C. premiere in a confused and confusing production by Solas Nua, the great theater company dedicated to works by living Irish dramatists. The show certainly doesn’t lack for ambition, but it’s somehow both overcooked and undernourished, boasting several fine performances but ultimately sunk by a muddled narrative,......

Man, I had the craziest hallucination last night. Thing is, about 2,000 other people had it, too, and to give due credit, it wasn’t really my hallucination. It was Yukio Ninagawa’s. The multi-Olivier-award winning director, who picked up a knighthood from Her Majesty’s Government in 2002 for his bold reinterpretations of the likes of Twelfth Night and Medea (making him, um, Sir Yukio, we guess), has brought his Shintoku-Maru to the Kennedy Center for a......

What better time than the day after the State of the Union address to be reminded that exaggeration, obfuscation, and just-plain-making-shit-up can be employed for benign purposes as well as sinister ones? Solas Nua's Trad is a show that delights in benevolent hyperbole like no other in recent memory, and its pleasures are plentiful indeed. Playwright Mark Doherty's wry, spry meditation on tradition and familial identity and especially -- O! How we we wish......

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,......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Major Release: There Will Be Blood We should have held our tongues on our top 10 for the year until the actual end of the year. Paul Thomas Anderson's new film slipped in just under the 2007 wire in limited release last week, and the director channels John Huston, Stanley Kubrick, and his own wild-eyed imagination......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Repertory: The Third Man The AFI continues to please with yet another showing of an absolute must-see classic. Last week it was The 400 Blows, and this week it's three showings of Carol Reed's gripping British noir, The Third Man. Based on a story and a screenplay by Graham Greene, the movie is a study in......

For dance lovers looking to get into the holiday spirit, The Nutcracker is a must at this time of year. Thankfully, the Washington D.C. area has numerous performances of the beloved ballet from which to choose. While there’s over a dozen performances ranging in size from huge ballet troupes to small dance studios, here's a few that stand out among the rest. American Ballet Theater: Few companies can compete with the size and talents of......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Repertory: The 400 Blows Expect to see plenty of French New Wave retrospectives over the next year or so, as 2008 represents the movement's 50th anniversary. If Claude Chabrol's 1958 Le Beau Serge lit the fuse, François Truffaut's 400 Blows was the first in a subsequent series of cinematic explosions that announced France's new generation of......

Harry Potter’s Aunt Petunia is half-buried in the Earth. But hey, who isn’t? That, I’d say, is a fair reduction of Samuel Beckett’s 1961 Happy Days, a not-quite-monologue for a middle aged woman who is stuck in a rut, though really it seems to be more of a pool of slow-acting quicksand. And the woman playing The Woman — actually, she has a name; it’s Winnie — in the National Theatre of Great Britain......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Indie: Romance & Cigarettes John Turturro's third film as a director is the sort that seems tailor made to become a cult classic. Not nearly polished or glamorous enough to be the sort of Broadway to big screen musical hit that Chicago or Hairspray was, it was too oddball to fit into the heads of most......

MONDAY >> The Library of Congress Mary Pickford Theatre in the James Madison Building kicks off 5 weeks worth of free Monday night rock and pop films with a rare showing of the 1966 documentary, The Big T.N.T. Show. David "Man from Uncle" McCallum hosts Ray Charles, Petula Clark, the Lovin' Spoonful, Bo Diddley, Joan Baez, the Ronettes, Roger Miller, the Byrds, Donovan, the Seeds, the Modern Folk Quartet, and Ike and Tina Turner taped......

FRIDAY: >> Local comic book store Fantom Comics is celebrating the grand opening of their new Union Station store tonight with a party from 6 to 10:30 p.m. They'll be serving up free pizza on the early side and the comedy stylings of the Geek Comedy Tour during the second half of the night. There will also be a trivia contest with $500 gift certificates up for grabs. The party is inside the Union......

>> The Shakespeare Theatre Company has started a special program, called 20/10, that offers people aged 35 and under discounted tickets for their performances. The program launches tonight, with a special performance of Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine where all of the tickets will be $10 for the under 35 crowd, and they're promising a DJ, drink specials and door prizes for those who take advantage. Call the box office at (202) 547-1122 for details. >>......

With monuments and museums, Washington, D.C. is a haven for history buffs. But what do most of us really know about Virginia? The Kathy Harty Gray Dance Theatre will combine a history lesson with dance with two performances of “Women in Virginia and Other Favorites” this weekend at Northern Virginia Community College's Alexandria campus. The performance will include excerpts of the company’s touring program “Stories to Remember about Women in Virginia”, which covers 400 years......

The Post's Marc Fisher alerted us to some exciting news on Wednesday: the possibility of Chuck Brown and Duke Ellington meeting in D.C. No, smelling salts aren't involved. Rather, Ward 1 Council member Jim Graham is proposing naming sections of T Street NW and 7th Street NW after the two local music legends in Shaw. The renaming would coincide with the expected reopening of the historic Howard Theatre in 2008, a place where both......

For all his success outside of it, David Mamet has done all right by Hollywood. More than all right, in fact: His screenplays for The Verdict and Wag the Dog were nominated for Oscars, and, like Woody Allen, he gets to direct his own scripts just the way he wants to because 1) he’s got such unassailable artistic cred that everybody wants to work with him, and 2) he never spends very much money.......

FRIDAY: >> The Howard Homecoming events could make an entire Weekend Picks feature by themselves, but don't forget to consider some of the less publicized goings on we're recommending as a way to enjoy the fun without the insane crowds. >> Tickets are still available for the amazingly cheap (only $10!) Catalyst Theatre Company production of Kafka's The Trial. Check out our review over here, and get your tickets — did we mention they’re only......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Indie: Lake of Fire Michael Moore may have grabbed all the press where high profile documentaries are concerned, but it's Tony Kaye's Lake of Fire that is being quietly talked about as the most powerful documentary of the year. Which is remarkable considering its subject is one of the most talked about and analyzed issues on......

Franz Kafka ordered his friend Max Brod to burn his incomplete novel The Trial after his death in 1924; Brod edited and published it instead. Although written more than 80 years ago, the book was so prescient in its portrayal of a idly malevolent bureaucracy that it feels timeless. Christopher Gallu has written a new adaptation for Catalyst Theatre Company (where he is Producing Artistic Director), and here he steps into some mammoth shoes:......

Have you heard? Geeks wish they were hot. Men love their cars, and don't seem to call after a first date. And women have to wait in long lines for the bathroom, while men are stuck waiting around for them to finish shopping. I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, the new Bethesda Theatre's first production, has been playing off-Broadway for, well, forever, and the show doesn't offer any startling revelations into the opposite sex......

>> DAM! Fest kicks of with its first night of shows featuring a dozen different bands at three venues, including New York's A Place to Bury Strangers (don't miss our interview with the band) and Dirty on Purpose at the Rock and Roll Hotel, Vandaveer and Julie Ocean at the Red and The Black, and Foreign Islands at DC9, among many others. Check out our guide to the DAM! highlights. >> Two film festivals open......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Repertory: D.C. Labor FilmFest Strictly speaking, the D.C. Labor FilmFest isn't a repertory festival, but with over half of their programming falling into that category, plus a dedicated retrospective to the great Ken Loach, we'll go ahead and shoehorn it into the category this week. The festival is put on by the Washington Metro Council of......

Today is National Coming Out Day, a day when gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people are encouraged to be open about who they are. The annual observance began on October 11, 1988, exactly one year after the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. (The first one was held October 14, 1979.) While there aren't usually major events to commemorate the day, there are a couple of local events that coincide with......

Pitiable...arresting...bad-ass...shrew? Charlayne Woodard's portrayal of the infamous Kate in Shakespeare Theatre's The Taming of the Shrew defies one-word description. She's an integral part of what's so appealing about Rebecca Bayla Taichman's take on the show, a production which almost manages to overcome the sexist undercurrents of the work itself. For those who missed English class that day (or have never seen Kiss Me Kate, or Ten Things I Hate About You, or that "Moonlighting" episode...),......

It’s been proven again and again: Art thrives on restriction. And kitschy art demands it the way even the most genteel of man-bat hybrids demand hot, fresh blood. So it’s no surprise that the best thing about Landless Theatre Company’s current revival of Bat Boy: The Musical is its audacious modesty. That’s not an oxymoron: Their production is low-budget, low-tech, low-brow, and high camp. One wishes it was a bit more high-efficiency: No show......

Early yesterday morning, the tragic news was announced. On Myspace, a bulletin appeared that read: Ian Mackaye, lead singer of influential hardcore band Minor Threat as well as Fugazi passed away today in a Baltimore hospital room. Outside a Fugazi show in New Jersey last night, the singer was struck by a car passing by the front of the Ventura Theatre. Brunswick police say that the driver allegedly stopped, but then fled the scene. There......

Dysfunctional relationship musicals...the Odyssey revisited...a one-nun show...one can't say the D.C. theater scene is relying only on Halloween for their October programming inspiration (though we do, at least, have some Poe still playing). Here's an overview of what's opening this month. Not only a new show, but a new theater! Bethesda Theatre hopes that I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, a relationship musical which has been compared to Seinfeld in its sensibilities, will become......