One of the major revelations is that the self-proclaimed “grande dame” of Potomac may no longer reside in the town.

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.

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. That’s no slight on Cate Blanchett, who fronts, fights, twirls and finally, crawls her way through a towering, plaintive gut-punch of a performance as Blanche DuBois,…

Photo by Chris Rief aka Spodie Odie.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…

Jesse Terrill tries Steve Beall’s patience in Journeymen’s sharp production of Moliere’s Tartuffe. Written by DCist contributor Andrej Krasnansky. How can a 17th-century play, written entirely in rhyming couplets and aimed at the French aristocracy, be relevant today? The same way even Clinton-era South Park is still enjoyable: Concentrated satire has a long shelf life. Moliere’s play Tartuffe portrays a rich man, Orgon, taken in by Tartuffe, a sinner wearing the hairshirt of a…

Hot for Teacher: Erin Weaver and Cody Nickell get excited about math in Aaron Posner’s new production of “Arcadia.” 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. Not so vis-à-vis the play: Arcadia was hailed…

Simon Boyle insists upon due and proper credit for his daddy-killin’ in DRUID’s Playboy of the Western World. Photo by Nick Burchell. 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….

Andrew Long, Ted van Griethuysen, and Aubrey K. Deeker form an uneasy alliance in Antony and Cleopatra. Photo by Carol Pratt. 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…

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,…