Set in racially charged 1963, Tony Kushner’s 2006 play about a struggling African-American family brings down the house.

This ambitious Round House and Olney Theatre production matches the scope of one of the seminal works of modern theater.

Steven Spielberg’s biopic of the nation’s 16th president is but a pale and fairly lifeless approximation of the conflicts that tore the nation apart.

Meryl Streep as Mother Courage in John Walter’s absorbing, perceptive Theater of War. There are documentaries that entertain and many more that educate, and there are plenty that grab you by the lapels and spout hummus-breath in your face about how you need to stop eating meat and trade your vulgar, barbarous combustion-powered vehicle in for a bike — today! Then there are the rare documentaries that prod you, subtly but insistently, to reexamine the…

Rorschach Theatre’s production of A Bright Room Called Day does an excellent job of bringing on the tension. Sometimes it’s during a young woman’s vehement, Reagan-hating scenes set in the early 1980s. In her fervent state of alarm and outrage, she would be just as at home standing in front of the White House today, railing against the current adminstration. Sometimes it’s in watching the breakdown of one character, a tortured homosexual man (Alexander Strain),…

FRIDAY: >> Get in line early tonight at the Rorschach Theatre in Columbia Heights for a special Pay-What-You-Can performance of their revival of Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day. Set in Berlin in the 1930’s, Bright Room is one of Kushner’s (Angels in America, Homebody/Kabul) earlier plays, but by no means his least accomplished. If younger District residents aren’t able to connect easily with Zillah, who is consumed by a hatred for Ronald Reagan,…

MONDAY: Tony Kushner will discuss the plays of Arthur Miller with Jeffrey Brown at the Avalon Theatre, 5612 Connecticut Ave NW. Topics may or may not include who the baddest Jewish playwright of our time really is, and whether anyone who convinced the likes of Marilyn Monroe to convert has any competition in that category to begin wtih. Tickets are $13 each; two tickets are included with the purchase of a book. 8:15 p.m. WEDNESDAY:…