Trey Graham

If specificity of experience is a thing to which the ongoing Women’s Voices Theater Festival hopes to open the (stage) door, then Ironbound is rousing affirmation that the idea is a fine one. Martyna Majok’s rough-throated, 90-minute immigrant story…

They’re barely 30, but the songwriting team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul have already made a tidy career of reworking popular properties for the musical comedy stage. Their credits include the kid-targeted James and the Giant Peach (based on the…

There’s style to spare in the Keegan Theatre’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—apt costuming, blue-moody lighting, languid language rolling lazily off reasonably Southern-accented lips, a handsomely rehabbed Church Street playhouse to contain Big Daddy’s…

Think about what a mask brings to the party—its distancing power, its distracting allure, the way it both conceals and reveals. It can disguise the individual and suggest the universal. It can deceive; it can pierce a veil to uncover truth. Masks are…

A story that begins as schizophrenically as “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” was pretty much destined to find its way into the twisted dramaturgical hands of Everett Quinton, whose travesties as a member of the Ridiculous…

Tribalism. I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately—rereading Armistead Maupin’s magnificent Tales of the City books, with their beautifully observed portraits of the tight-knit clan at Barbary Lane, not to mention the various and decidedly varied…

The Campsite Rule, a pleasant trifle of a comedy by Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri, takes the somewhat less-than-contentious position that sex between consenting adults is fun, and that intelligent banter about it can be, too. In a brisk…

A mother and a teacher square off for a tense 75-minute conference in Gidion’s Knot. The subject? A fifth-grader who’s been suspended and, in the wake of that disciplinary action, committed suicide. What did he do to warrant his suspension? What…

Minimalism usually makes for better horror, at least on the stage: An audience’s imagination can conjure creepier images than the most eloquent direction and the most convincing special effects. Not so with the musical version of Stephen King’s…

Crisply staged, cleanly replotted, and sung to the rafters by a cast seemingly on loan from the celestial choir, the overhauled Side Show onstage at the Kennedy Center is the revival this cult-favorite musical deserves—one that promises to get the…

Michael Urie is the kind of charmed storyteller who can get away with laughing at his own jokes. As an underemployed L.A. actor with a decidedly unusual day job, he’ll drop some gem-sharp absurdity, pause to let the audience guffaw, widen his eyes in…

“Whenever heroics are called for,” snarls Kathleen Turner in that unmistakable burr-edged baritone of hers, “it’s a sure sign someone’s fucked up.” Make no mistake, there are fuckups and heroics aplenty in Mother Courage and Her Children, the epic…

Two shows, two journey-to-self epics about disenchanted young people coming into their own—but only one works as well as you’d hope. That would be Peter and the Starcatcher, the giddily acrobatic story of how Peter Pan got to be a Lost Boy, currently…

Done with the right touch—a kind of airy, thoughtless conviction—Oscar Wilde’s comedy can be perfectly effervescent. Lean too hard into his wit, though, and…well, let me quote the playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, who writes that it’s easy to overemphasize…

The first time I sobbed out loud at Signature Theatre was in 1996—Eric Schaeffer’s production of Passion, in that bumper-plating factory that was the company’s home back then. I remember calling my colleague Bob Mondello from the pay phone in the…

Maurice Hines is a showman, a smooth operator, and he’s made a career out of moving stylishly through touchstone shows like Sophisticated Ladies and Guys and Dolls. He’s not doing anything revolutionary in the fond family memoir Maurice Hines Is…

What’s the right way to react when you learn a grim secret? The best strategy when a brother calls you on your bullshit? The sensible response when—rather than turning away from a confrontation—your sister-in-law digs in and says, if not in so many…

Let’s just acknowledge that This is an awfully unspecific title for a play that’s so exceedingly, endlessly, entertainingly specific about the feelings and failings of its characters. But then writer Melissa James Gibson likes to have it both…

What might one day be a trenchant black comedy about an aging parent and an alienated child is—in its current incarnation at Arena Stage—two or three fine soliloquies connected by tissue of wanly familiar relationship drama and a dubious conceit.…

I went back and forth for the longest time on Torch Song Trilogy: Brittle and silly one moment, hopelessly stagey in another, urgent and acid and fierce in the next, it’s a rough beast of a play—three one-acts, initially, herded catlike into a…