“If I do my job as an actor, you won’t notice that I’m South Asian or that I’m a woman, or even that I’m playing one of the most controversial political figures of all time. I’m portraying a person at a crossroads struggling with a difficult decision.” So says Zehra Fazal (pictured right) of her striking portrayal of Adolf Hitler in her self-produced, one-woman adaptation of Yukio Mishima’s play, My Friend Hitler, currently running at…

MONDAY Sometime between youthful dreams of baseball fame and the adult accomplishment of becoming a published author, shit got downright peripatetic in the career of David Goodwillie. His varied occupational stopovers are documented in bursting detail in Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, which the author discusses at Politics and Prose tonight at 7 p.m. 5015 Connecticut Avenue, NW. TUESDAY Democratic operatives by the metric ton bought into his political linguistic theories when…

October is here, and it’s inevitable that local theater companies would try to haunt us with some spookier fare. Here’s a look at who’s obliging our more macabre sensibilities next month: >> Don’t tell Mom, well, anything about the babysitter? Studio Theatre has Marie Ndiaye’s Hilda, a horror story about a mother’s growing obsession over the woman she hires to care for her kids (Oct 5). >> There’s double, double, toil and trouble over at…

Plays by women; plays about women. The fairer sex captures the imagination of many D.C. theaters this September, offering works by celebrated female authors and performing plays that focus on female characters. And if that’s not your thing, well, there’s always Kafka. Two area theaters present works by Caryl Churchill — Studio Theatre performing A Number beginning Sept. 7, and Fountainhead Theatre staging Top Girls, which opens Sept. 8. The former show explores ethical issues…

Sexual intrigue, Hellen Keller and urine; that’s what area theaters have to offer us during the slow month of August, the dead time between the close of the ’04/’05 season and the beginning of the new one. In all seriousness, August still has plenty of offerings for D.C. theatergoers, as a bunch of well-received shows take final bows and a few exciting new productions make their debuts. People can’t stop tinkering with Les Liasons…

An arguably unjust war, largely driven by imperialism. Scores of lives, often belonging to civilians, lost. Sound familiar? Scena Theatre hopes the obvious parallels between today’s post-9/11 world and its production of Robert Auletta’s adaptation of Aeschylus’ The Persians will strike a chord with its audience. Aeschylus’s original, the oldest surviving play in history, is a rather straightforward piece. Examining the Battle of Salamis, which took place in 480 B.C. between the Greeks and the…