Remembering a divide

In the fall of 2019, two plays opened on Broadway written by gay men of color. The first was Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play, transferring from a hit off-Broadway run. The Black writer made a provocative work set in the antebellum South, staging sexual submission scenes with enslaved people — before taking a wild turn, and engaging with power dynamics between interracial couples in the present day. The second play was Matthew López’s The Inheritance, transferring from an award-winning West End run. The Puerto Rican writer created a two-part, seven-hour epic. López translates E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End into a 2010s New York City, to explore the enduring influence of the AIDS pandemic in gay America.

In subject matter, Harris’ and López’s shows overlap. Both reveal how physical diseases create psychological trauma, arguing that historical events terrorize the present moment. Both works are also very gay, staging group sex scenes with a frank, subversive pleasure.

Yet in mood, Slave Play and The Inheritance are worlds apart. Harris writes what he calls an “exorcism,” challenging audiences with racial and sexual violence, and showing uncrossable divides between lovers. Slave Play aims to disturb, but The Inheritance aims for catharsis. López challenges audiences with beauty: characters monologue about caring for the sick, and the play’s coup de théâtre includes a resurrection of dead bodies miraculously healed. The racial makeup for each play’s Broadway production should be noted, too. Slave Play had an equal number of Black and white/“white-passing” cast members. The Inheritance had actors of color in smaller roles, but every main character was played by a white man.

In the fall of 2019, I was a junior in college studying theater, and the buzz around both shows was inescapable. I saved up some of my RA money to see Slave Play on Broadway, and left feeling devastated. The queer interracial relationships onstage felt uncomfortably familiar to my own experiences in Virginia. I hadn’t saved up enough money to also catch The Inheritance, but I ordered its playscript as soon as it was published.

On the page, I appreciated López’s detailed prose and melodrama, but The Inheritance didn’t sweep me away with emotion. Its knowing portrait of upper-class, millennial NYC felt unwelcoming. This was a gay world I knew existed, but to me as a Gen Z reader, it had little to do with the gay community I was living in. When I saw production photos of The Inheritance, they resembled Provincetown Instagram posts: attractive and sun-kissed, but insular and homogenous.

The differences between Slave Play and The Inheritance also reflected a growing divide I felt in gay academia. Slave Play aligned with a specifically Black movement led by scholars like Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, L.H. Stallings, and Frank B. Wilderson III. These writers acknowledge that Black Americans have never been treated as “human,” so these writers reject that label and slyly embrace submission and non-human modes of being. The Inheritance instead aligned itself with José Esteban Muñoz and Tavia Nyong’o: writers exploring how gay culture can create hopeful, utopic spaces of belonging through memory and imagination. Both sides of queer scholarship felt oppositional to each other. One undid the idea of belonging at all, and the other affirmed new spaces of belonging. The debate demanded I pick a side.

In a way, I chose Slave Play’s side. The year 2019 was a time when the Trump administration was wreaking havoc on American institutions, so Slave Play boldly intervened into American storytelling (joining other Black playwrights and journalists of the time). Harris’ play matched the zeitgeist of Gen Z teens looking for disruption. So as I developed my journalistic practice, I extensively covered Slave Play, championing it as a work truly of our times, a play openly exploring my biracial and Virginian identities.

Yet in many ways, the rest of the world chose The Inheritance’s side. The Broadway production spoke to the Gen X gay men who lived through the height of the AIDS crisis. The Inheritance definitively triumphed at the 2021 Tony Awards, winning four awards, including Best Play. In that same ceremony, Slave Play was nominated for 12 awards, making it the most Tony-nominated play in history up to that point. Slave Play also lost every nomination, a fact that still feels pointed to me. It seemed like the world saw two differing versions of queerness: one brutal and eviscerating, the other optimistic and comforting. The world picked the latter option, and has since seen The Inheritance produced across the globe.

The Inheritance has now arrived closer to my hometown, at Bethesda, Maryland’s Round House Theatre (where it’s playing through November 2). Today, I’m different from my 2019 self — as I’ve written about in this publication, I’ve now participated in the affluent NYC culture that once intimidated me, and traveled into queer adulthood. The Round House production presented a unique opportunity to reconsider The Inheritance from a mature perspective. 

When going to both parts of the Round House production, I tried to let go of any assumptions or biases I had about the play itself, and watch with an open mind. This revival delivers incredible performances and exquisite direction, but I still found The Inheritance to be a flawed play that doesn’t successfully engage with gay history. This Round House production does, however, achieve something far stranger for me. This show convinced me that both The Inheritance and Slave Play aren’t the best way forward for queer theater.

Watching with appreciation and fear

This Round House revival demands a closer inspection of the play’s plot. The Inheritance opens with a group of young gay men sitting on stage, hoping to write a story about their lives. One young man (played by Jordi Betrán Ramírez) returns to his favorite novel Howards End, thus summoning the presence of its author E.M. Forster (Robert Sella). The rest of the play unfolds as a communal retelling of Howards End, with the ensemble speaking in assured third-person narration to the audience.

The Schlegel sisters, the protagonists of Howards End navigating romance and class in England, have become an American gay couple. It’s 2015, and Eric Glass (David Gow) is celebrating his 33rd birthday party in his spacious Manhattan apartment, which is also about to lose its rent-controlled status. He lives with his partner, Toby Darling (Adam Poss), a snarky but endearing novelist who’s adapting his writing for the stage.

After some intense sex, Eric and Toby decide to get married. But two chance encounters with other gay men set off a chain of developments. First, the recent college graduate Adam (also played by Ramírez) arrives at Eric’s party to retrieve a mistakenly-swapped tote bag — and soon joins the friend group, even auditioning to play the lead in Toby’s play. Then, Eric starts forming a friendship with the ailing Walter Poole (also played by Sella), an older gay man married to the wealthy businessman Henry Wilcox (Robert Gant). Walter tells Eric about his romance with Henry: they found each other just before the AIDS crisis hit New York City, and escaped to an upstate house to avoid being surrounded by death. Yet Walter would use their home to care for his dying friends, leading to a strained relationship with Henry.

As an adaptation of Howards End, The Inheritance is very shrewd. López tackles the central theme of the novel — what responsibilities we owe to strangers, family, and lovers — and grounds it in the millennial generation of gay men. It’s a generation that has tangibly benefited from gay liberation movements, but one that still can’t shake oppression. By making all but one of his characters gay men, López can better dramatize connections between all the story’s characters. The Inheritance’s web of friendly, romantic, and sexual situationships is one I find accurate to modern queer life.

Director Tom Story excels when utilizing the large ensemble of this Round House production. The image of gay men gathered together recurs throughout the show — yearning individually, but connected physically. Each time that image appeared, it took my breath away. Story also encourages his ensemble to perform narration with a steady demeanor, emphasizing the show’s metatheatricality. I’m reminded of the gay film critic Parker Tyler, who wrote in 1944, “The [film] spectator must be a suave and wary guest, one educated in a profound, naïve-sophisticated conspiracy to see as much as he can take away with him.” At its best, The Inheritance feels like López’s witty conspiracy to take away as much from Howards End as possible. This ensemble likewise makes the audience feel like we’re part of a suave in-crowd, seeing everything gay NYC offers.

Yet for most of The Inheritance’s runtime, I could feel Story (and this Round House production) working overtime to massage the play’s flaws. The most consistent critique of the Broadway production was that despite the play being written by someone of Puerto Rican descent, The Inheritance’s cast was too white. López defended himself in 2020 by stating, “Eric Glass, my central character, may be a white man, but he is a white man who was created by a Puerto Rican one. That has fundamentally informed his journey through the play.” It’s a valid rebuttal, one I’ve seen playwrights of color Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Larissa FastHorse make while defending their Broadway shows led by white actors. What these playwrights fail to address is that productions about people of color aren’t often produced at the same level. It’s because Eric Glass is white that he can journey to Broadway.

Thankfully, the cast of this Round House production is much more diverse, adding dimension to the play’s social mobility narratives. When the actor of color Adam Poss plays Toby Darling, suddenly his search for wealth makes more sense to me. In Toby, I recognize my own Asian American family members who think succeeding under capitalism will end their feelings of alienation. Looking through the playbill, I also discovered that Ramírez previously played B in Sanctuary City. That play stressed how safety can feel maddeningly arbitrary in America, and that same idea also animates Ramírez’s characters (Young Man 1, Adam, and later Leo).

Still, these resonances for audiences of color are all subtext. López writes with detail about Eric’s German immigrant family, but doesn’t offer that same specificity to Toby’s family. In fact, Toby’s character arc is a textbook definition of the trauma plot: for nearly six hours, López dangles Toby’s horrific backstory in front of the audience like a carrot on a stick. When López finally gives us the backstory, he’s hoping to provide justification for all of Toby’s anger, and to deliver a wallop of pathos. I mostly felt manipulated. Toby didn’t feel like a real person, just a sentimental, tragic archetype.

That’s the same problem facing Leo — a poor, Gen Z sex worker who makes a treacherous journey through NYC. Still, Ramírez delivers a heartbreaking performance as the character, conjuring an intense daze of desperation. It’s through Leo that López writes most incisively about the AIDS pandemic. “He thought of the chain of infection that had been passed along the years,” Leo states, “decades and generations, his particular lineage moving from person to person, until it was eventually passed to him. A bitter inheritance. And yet, despite this chain of humanity, Leo never felt so alone in all his life.” 

Deep into the show’s second part, these lines made my ears prick up. Even if Leo was an archetype, maybe he would speak up for truly marginalized Americans. But just as Henry Wilcox retreats into his wealth to escape the AIDS pandemic, López retreats into his wealthy characters and away from his poor, HIV-positive ones. Leo is granted a few moments of delicate feeling, but The Inheritance is far more focused on cataloging bespoke restaurants, dazzling art performances, and opulent apartments. Within this epic is nearly an hour of Vogue-esque lifestyle writing.

This writing reveals López’s ownership over NYC, one he sees as hard-earned. In a 2019 New Yorker profile, López shared his sadness at having been raised in Florida, stating, “I feel like what was taken from me without my consent — before I was born — was my birthright, which was being a New Yorker.” López’s attitude reminds me of Jeremy Atherton Lin’s book Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, wherein Lin recounts a 1990s gay San Francisco reeling from AIDS but also doubling down on gentrification. “I’d imagined that homos moved to the city out of rebellion,” Lin writes. “I hadn’t considered entitlement as a motivating factor.” López’s entitlement fuels The Inheritance. Although the playwright has dramatized NYC’s changing neighborhoods, here López doesn’t explore gay men’s status as harbingers of urban displacement. The Inheritance itself sometimes feels like a work of gentrification, of sanitized luxury. López wants to show wealthy gays in all their splendor, bitchiness, and beauty.

The song can’t last forever

Beauty, more than anything, is the goal of this production of The Inheritance. Tom Story encourages us to appreciate the male form; Colin K. Bills’ lighting design bathes actors in exquisite colors; Lee Savage’s scenic design includes gorgeous cherry blossoms. Historically, AIDS narratives have been tragedies rendered ugly and stomach-churning. The Inheritance offers a corrective of sorts, envisioning a gay future of sun-dappled beauty.

Yet after hours of tasting The Inheritance’s sweetness, I wondered where Leo’s “bitter inheritance” had gone. In 2018, writer Doreen St. Félix critiqued the film adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk, arguing that the film’s beauty sanded down the rough edges of James Baldwin’s original novel. When I’m feeling most cynical, this is exactly what I see López doing to the AIDS pandemic. It’s ironic that Washington, DC is an important site of gay activism, but none of that energy is captured in this DC production. Watch the documentary How to Survive a Plague and you’ll see ACT UP protesters putting red dye in fountains to make them resemble blood, chanting, “Bringing the dead to your door, we won’t take it anymore!” and spreading the ashes of AIDS victims on the White House lawn. 

I don’t expect every AIDS narrative to stage polemic moments like that. Still, it’s telling that López felt obligated to include activist characters in The Inheritance, but didn’t fully explore them. Black characters like Jason #1 (John Floyd) and Tristan (Jamar Jones) reference the double standards Black and transgender people face in the LGBTQ community. But they mostly state statistics, serving as human virtue signals not woven into the larger arc of the show. The play’s sole leftist character, Jasper (Hunter Ringsmith), is similarly underwritten. Jasper keeps bringing strained identity politics into his capitalist critiques — and while some 2010s activists certainly did this, I just don’t buy that this middle-aged character would make those mistakes. Jasper feels like a straw-man López writes just so that a billionaire gay man can tear him down. The Inheritance hints at disturbing histories in the gay community — but the play ameliorates those histories with flowery writing. Similar to the AIDS Memorial Quilt, The Inheritance sometimes smothers horrors under a fastidious beauty.

I’ve loved this kind of beauty before. The Inheritance reminds me of Sufjan Stevens’ song “The Only Thing” (coming from Stevens’ album Carrie and Lowell, a stunning reflection on his mother’s death). In the song, the narrator encounters the dangers also faced by Toby and Leo: addiction, self-harm. The only thing protecting him? Beauty. He recalls constellations of stars, animals in nature, and his mother’s face. When the narrator asks “Should I tear my eyes out now, before I see too much?,” it’s because the world is too beautiful to bear.

When I’ve been at my lowest, I’ve needed this message. “The Only Thing” has sometimes been the only thing stopping me from harming myself. Stevens’ voice reminds me there’s so much wonder in the world. Recently, though, Stevens has disavowed this message. For the 10th Anniversary Edition of Carrie and Lowell, the singer-songwriter wrote an essay stating that this music was an unhealthy way to grieve:

I could never make sense of the nothingness that consumed me, and it was foolhardy to believe anything good could come of superimposing my mother’s memory onto my music in the first place. But I did it just the same. And the result was a hot mess. For the first time in my life, I was faced with the limitations of a creative process that exercised exploitation and exhibitionism as expressions of personal truth. My music failed me.

When I watch The Inheritance, I see a similar “hot mess” of art and grief. Both López and Stevens transform suffering into an almost holy tableau, but fail to truly understand their pain. Just as Stevens superimposed his mother’s death onto his music, López superimposes the entirety of the AIDS pandemic onto his drama. He’s created a redemption fantasy for the dead so gorgeous it threatens to mask the agony of the people who were (and are) victims of the AIDS pandemic.

The Inheritance is beautiful. But that beauty comes at a terrible cost.

Who shall inherit the stage?

I’m not the only person of my generation who feels this way about The Inheritance. I’ve spoken to multiple gay friends my age who saw the play’s Broadway production, and they all arrived at the same conclusion: this is history we want to remember, but maybe this specific play isn’t the best way to restage it. The creative team behind this revival cares deeply about passing along this play to subsequent generations, but The Inheritance already feels like a dated 2010s period piece. The play’s epilogue, written for a future 2022, now takes place in the past.

The six years between the 2019 Broadway production and this 2025 Round House production have felt like a lifetime. But it’s a lifetime where, as the recent film One Battle After Another puts it, “very little has changed.” The COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement promised transformational changes to society, but those changes are now erased from existence by the second Trump presidency. Just like in 2019, The Inheritance feels overly optimistic in the face of destruction. In The Inheritance, there’s little discussion about political strategies to resist Republican administrations; gay men find solace only through individual acts of kindness.

If anything good has come from discourse around The Inheritance, it’s that queer writers are now more conscious of the politics shaping their stories. Joel Kim Booster’s rom-com Fire Island also translates a classic novel of manners (Pride and Prejudice) into the gay community. But thankfully, Booster properly explores divides across race, class, and body type in his film. Steven Phillips-Horst’s article “We’ve Reached Peak Gay Sluttiness” also lovingly catalogues a sexually liberated friend group, yet with a keener eye for the influence of capitalism and technology.

Dramatists are also filling in the narrative gaps that López missed. The Inheritance only features one woman character: Margaret, a mother who discusses caring for her sick son. Yet Paula Vogel’s Mother Play, being staged by Studio Theatre next month, offers more multidimensional women. Drawing on her own experiences caring for a brother who died of AIDS, Vogel writes more candidly about the physical demands of care labor, and creates a detailed look at homophobia within the DC community. Even Drew Droege’s play Messy White Gays, currently in previews in NYC, seems to more directly address race and entitlement.

Nowadays, I feel ambivalent about both López’s work and Slave Play. For years, I’ve approached Slave Play from a defensive stance: no regional theater in DC has staged Harris’ work, a sign to me that it’s not considered “palatable” enough for DC audiences. But Slave Play and The Inheritance now seem like two theatrical extremes: one overwhelms me with cruelty, the other overwhelms me with beauty. Both are unsustainable to stage in the long run. And for me, both offer unsustainable political practices, for both queer theater and queer life. I can’t feel devastation or catharsis all the time. 

If there’s one play I’ve seen that synthesizes Slave Play and The Inheritance, it’s Jordan Tanahill’s Prince Faggot (now running in NYC’s Studio Seaview). The show opens similarly to The Inheritance: a group of LGBTQ actors gather to reminisce on their queer childhoods and the culture that’s shaped them. Tanahill’s show then imagines what would happen if a future heir to the English throne was a gay man, with the six-person ensemble playing multiple roles.

Just like López, Tanahill is invested in what responsibilities gay men have toward strangers, family, and lovers. Similar to The Inheritance, Prince Faggot is an ambitious epic, spanning decades of history, exploring what’s inherited across generations of gay men. Yet Tanahill’s work also picks up on the best parts of Harris’ Slave Play. Prince Faggot is unafraid to shock its audience with intense kink and sex. The show also investigates the uncrossable divides in interracial relationships, staging the horrific legacies of the United Kingdom’s colonialism.

The show’s most ingenious moments are also its most affecting. After scenes about the royal family, Prince Faggot’s actors will seemingly break the fourth wall, delivering part-fictional, part-real monologues to the audience. After a sex scene, Rachel Crowl shares a bold story about watching that scene in rehearsals, feeling a mixture of admiration and jealousy as a trans woman. After a parade scene, N’yomi Allure Stewart talks frankly about not caring about the royal family unless Black people like Meghan Markle are involved. She discusses NYC’s ballroom culture and the need for queer people to create their own monarchs.

Crowl and Stewart deliver powerful, personal interventions into Tanahill’s play. The actors remind me of the interventions critics of color like me have made into both Slave Play and The Inheritance — but when Crowl and Stewart perform their monologues onstage, their criticisms felt so vulnerable that I started to tear up.

I hope that future productions of The Inheritance, and future dramatists writing about the queer community, will include some of the directness of Prince Faggot. That radical honesty might create more sustainable political practice. Radical honesty might create theater that’s even more beautiful.

The Inheritance plays through November 2, 2025, at Round House Theatre, 4545 East-West Highway, Bethesda, MD (one block from Bethesda Metro station). Tickets ($50–$108) can be purchased by calling 240-644-1100, visiting the box office, or online (Learn more about special discounts here, accessibility here, and the Free Play program for students here.) Tickets are also available on TodayTix (Part One) and (Part Two).

Running Times:
The Inheritance, Part One: Approximately three hours and 25 minutes, including two 15-minute intermissions.
The Inheritance, Part Two: Approximately three hours and 15 minutes, including one 15-minute intermission and one 5-minute pause.

The digital program for The Inheritance is here

Advisory: Photography and video are strictly prohibited. Upon arrival, patrons will be asked to place a sticker over the camera on their phones, and it must remain in place for the duration of the performance. (Stickers are residue-free and are easily removed at the conclusion of the performance.)

The post Can queer theater ever be true to queer life? appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

This article was originally published in American Theatre Magazine on October 15, 2025. 

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has always been a part of my life. Growing up just outside of Washington, D.C., in the 2000s, I always saw its large marble building as integral to my city’s landscape, just as much as the Washington Monument. I came of age in the building, seeing Theater for Young Audiences as a kid, national tours of Broadway musicals as a middle schooler, and music concerts as a high schooler.

The creation of such a multifaceted arts organization was only possible thanks to the federal government. In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Cultural Center Act, which allocated D.C. land for a culture center, and mandated that it would be a privately funded organization. President John F. Kennedy helped fundraise for the building before his assassination, and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, helped dedicate the center as a “living memorial” to Kennedy. Johnson remarked at a groundbreaking ceremony that “artistic activity can enrich the life of our people, which really is the central object of Government.” The Kennedy Center officially opened in 1971.

More than 50 years later, from August 2022 through March 2025, the Kennedy Center was my employer. My official title was junior copywriter/coordinator, advertising communications, in which role I collaborated with marketers and programmers to promote the Center’s wide range of performances. I edited dance season brochures, interviewed artists for a patron magazine, wrote radio ads for comedians, and sent emails for free Millennium Stage shows. I was especially proud to promote the Social Impact team, which provided outreach programs to local and national communities. The team often used the Center’s recently built REACH space to provide classes, staged readings, discussions, festivals, and more.

My job dramatically changed early this year. On Friday, Feb. 7, The Atlantic reported the Trump administration’s plans to fire Kennedy Center board members (who historically were appointed by the president for six-year terms). Trump stated these intentions himself with a Truth Social post on the same day, which also said, “Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP.”

I spent the rest of that weekend waiting for the dominos to fall, and soon they did. (To read the rest of this article in American Theatre magazine, click here.)

The post Why I left the Kennedy Center appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

This past summer, DC audiences experienced the world premiere of We Are Gathered at Arena Stage (directed by Kent Gash). The newest work by celebrated playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, We Are Gathered traces the difficult romance between Tre and Free, two Black male artists considering marrying each other. But Tre struggles with fears of commitment, his difficult past, and the fact that he met Free while cruising at a park.

When I wrote about We Are Gathered for this publication, I found the play overwhelming and fascinating. Tre’s attempt to move beyond his traumatic origins mirrored McCraney’s desire to write beyond the adolescent protagonists that have defined his oeuvre. We Are Gathered marked a career turning point for McCraney. The show acknowledged all of the playwright’s creative influences and painful memories, but strove toward the future. We Are Gathered’s ending had a finality rarely seen in McCraney’s plays, with Tre telling his lover, “You decided to be here while I ran in a circle. And now the circle is complete. The round ‘o’ of the world is formed here.”

Now, a revival of McCraney’s most famous play, The Brothers Size, is playing at The Shed in New York City, a co-production with Geffen Playhouse. The play (first produced in NYC at the Public Theatre in 2007 and presented by 1st Stage in 2019) also follows two Black men: the boisterous Oshoosi Size comes out of incarceration to stay with his older brother, Ogun Size, a car mechanic. A “round ‘o’ of the world” is now staged literally at The Shed. At the beginning of the production, an actor pours white sand in a circle around the performance space, as if blessing a temporary altar. The script describes this moment as an “opening invocation [that] should be repeated for as long as needed to complete the ritual.” In The Brothers Size, characters try to achieve wholeness, but unlike in We Are Gathered, their circle ultimately feels incomplete.

The Brothers Size is timely and timeless, but there’s danger in McCraney revisiting such hallowed ground (he co-directs this Shed revival alongside Bijan Sheibani). How can McCraney move beyond coming-of-age narratives if he’s revisiting past ones? If We Are Gathered embraces the future, why is McCraney once again looking backward in The Brother Size? Yet watching both plays within a few months, I found these tensions more illuminating than confusing. The circles staged in We Are Gathered and The Brothers Size overlap, making Tre and Free’s lovely conclusion more unresolved, and making Oshoosi and Ogun’s open-ended conclusion more final.

—

The Brothers Size has a recurring quality: strained conversations between the Size brothers refract through dreams and memory. Oshoosi’s drawn to Elgba, a poetic friend from prison who also searches for freedom — and their connection takes a startling turn, undergirded by state violence.

Any summary of The Brothers Size’s plot risks reducing the show to a tragedy. But McCraney’s true focus is on how language creates simultaneous intimacy and distance. Characters narrate their own stage directions; their asides to the audience confirm their status as achingly real people and abstractions. When Oshoosi asks Ogun, “Why you got to be so hard all time?,” the question is both a joke and an accusation. Why can’t Ogun drop his hardened demeanor to show levity, grace? Why can’t the hard world outside of this play deliver grace, too?

Watching these productions of The Brothers Size and We Are Gathered, I’m struck by how similarly they’re staged. McCraney, Sheibani, and Gash place their performances in the round, with audiences on four sides. This allows asides and musical performances in both to feel surprisingly direct. We Are Gathered’s language also feels both intimate and distant. Tre’s monologues reveal a tortured mind that can’t plainly state how it feels. He’s a perfect foil to Ogun, who saves a monologue for the right moment, and unleashes it with a simplicity that’s devastating.

Yet Tre and Ogun feel like theatrical brothers. Whether they’re verbose or silent, extroverted or repressed, Black men in McCraney’s works (and America) still feel a desperate sense of dread. It’d be tempting to trace a linear progression from The Brothers Size to We Are Gathered: the Size brothers yearn for freedom in the “distant present,” and then Tre and Free actually experience more societal freedoms in 2025. However, there are moments in The Brothers Size when characters feel utterly safe, and many moments in We Are Gathered that acknowledge the anguish of 2025’s political climate. Freedom in both plays feels arbitrary. Age, time, and circumstance won’t necessarily save any of these characters.

McCraney emphasizes this fact through his casting in The Shed’s The Brothers Size. Although the script notes that Ogun and Elegba are “late 20s” and Oshoosi is “early 20s,” this production’s cast includes longtime McCraney collaborators who are middle-aged. Alani iLongwe embodies Oshoosi with an overcompensating bravado, trapped in a pre-prison adolescence despite being physically older. André Holland’s Ogun offers a steady counterweight, able to slow down the dialogue’s tempo (an older Ogun makes his paternalism feel even more pointed). At first, I wanted to compare this casting to that of Dance Nation. It’s older actors portraying their lost youth. However, the actors’ mix of exuberance and weariness forces me to acknowledge that the Size brothers were never granted the privilege of “youth” or “innocence” in America.

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For me, the most refreshing element of We Are Gathered was its unabashed queerness. McCraney’s works often follow queer men, but their sexuality might be a burgeoning identity (Eric in Wig Out!) or an open secret (Pharus in Choir Boy). In contrast, Tre and Free proudly state, “We’re here, we’re queer,” enrich themselves in queer media, and surround themselves within the LGBTQ+ community. So I was hesitant watching The Brothers Size in NYC — would queerness be forced into subtext or subterfuge? Elegba offers a particularly thorny character to stage nowadays: without careful direction, his libidinal movements can feel like entrapment.

Thankfully, this production of The Brothers Size doesn’t lose the queerness of Tre and Free. McCraney and Sheibani wisely bring some of Ogun’s stillness into Elegba’s scenes. Actor Malcolm Mays often portrays Elegba like he’s trapped in a reverie, not completely in control of his hands or mouth. Sexuality is a secure, inherent part of Elegba’s identity. But it’s still a mystery to him, and to us.

McCraney’s other works also now alleviate some of the paranoia around The Brother Size’s queer desires. Ogun plays many roles for Oshoosi throughout the show: role model, friend, bully, father figure, twin, mirror. Feeling drawn to someone of the same gender — not knowing if it’s identification, attraction, or jealousy — is a uniquely queer experience, but it’s also one that’s taboo. 2007 audiences watching The Brothers Size might have been shocked to witness this dynamic, but McCraney’s other art (Moonlight, We Are Gathered) now prepares me to recognize this dynamic across multiple narratives, and multiple lifetimes.

It’s worth noting that although I’ve seen three McCraney productions — We Are Gathered, The Brothers Size, and Choir Boy on Broadway — the queer sex scenes in all were staged abstractly. But queerness encompasses different kinds of physical performance, too. We Are Gathered featured an absurdly funny parody of “trade” masculinity that quickly became fabulous. Something similar happens here. Oshoosi and Ogun lip-sync to a song late in the show, and the smooth comedic gags take on the camp of drag. Even after a Size brother’s painful confession of “I fucked up,” I’m reminded of Michaela Angela Davis’s assertion that “[Black style] couldn’t be burned up or shot up or locked up. You can’t fuck it up.”

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Even though The Brothers Size functions as a complete story, it’s often understood as a brief glimpse into a long, emergent history. Ogun and Oshoosi are named after Yoruban spirits, so their personal woes take on the weight of a spiritual struggle. The Brothers Size is the middle chapter of McCraney’s trilogy The Brother/Sister Plays, so Ogun is haunted by the choices of a previous play. Maybe Ogun senses that his actions will haunt future stories.

At this point, Ogun’s actions haunt all of American theater. McCraney’s The Brother/Sister Plays has inspired too many contemporary plays to count (it’s so influential that, like the past, you can’t escape it). I’m reminded of a scene where Elegba brings a broken-down car to Ogun’s shop, and Ogun remarks, “…those one of those American Classics. / Those, ‘I will run longer and stronger then the human / Body’ cars. Man, please that car got plenty of run in it.” The Brothers Size has since become its own American classic. The play will outlast all of the bodies onstage in NYC.

Somewhere in this country — in a college classroom, in a regional theater, in a reader’s imagination, in an audience’s memory — Oshoosi and Ogun are running. They’re collapsing or returning or leaving each other. Even with the benefit of safety and time, maybe it’s a sign of grace that McCraney still joins their forever struggle.

Yet part of what made We Are Gathered so exciting to me was its dedication to closing the book on the past, to finally achieving some kind of peace. The Brothers Size may always be trapped in the middle of generational, spiritual, and theatrical narratives. But McCraney gracefully takes some of the decisiveness of We Are Gathered and shifts it over to this Shed production. I’ve reread The Brothers Size countless times, but it was only watching this performance — and somehow feeling McCraney’s metatheatrical presence — that the play’s ending finally felt like a relief. Just like Tre and Free, McCraney lives with a freedom the Size brothers can only imagine: McCraney can safely revisit his past. He can return home.

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The opening number of Michael R. Jackson’s musical A Strange Loop has always plunged me into a dizzying mirror world: I watch cruel reflections of myself as a queer man of color in the theater, and then the people staring back at me transform wildly. The musical opens with Usher, who introduces himself as a fat gay Black man attempting to write a “BIG BLACK AND QUEER-ASS / AMERICAN BROADWAY SHOW.” An all-Black, six-person chorus of Thoughts stands at his side, manifestations of Usher’s aching psyche. In one song, we realize Usher’s musical-in-progress is actually the very show we’re watching. And because Jackson (who wrote the show’s book, score, and lyrics) shares the same identities as Usher, we also realize A Strange Loop is a metafictional staging of Jackson’s own aching psyche.

After a 2019 off-Broadway premiere, A Strange Loop drew immense critical praise, subsequently winning the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, premiering in DC in 2021 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, and winning the 2022 Tony for Best Musical. It’s surreal, then, to see the show return to DC in a new production by Visionaries of the Creative Arts (VOCA) in collaboration with Deaf Austin Theatre. Director and choreographer Alexandra Wailes has created a bilingual production performed in both English and American Sign Language (ASL). It’s a wild creative gambit for an already wildly creative show, and Wailes’ staging rings true. But like its source material, this production also rings with frustrating contradictions.

In this production’s opening number, Usher (portrayed by Hard-of-Hearing actor and ASL music performer Gabriel Silva) signs to the audience, while non-Deaf audience members hear the Voice of Usher (Tyler “T” Lang). Behind Silva, video projections of Thoughts appear alongside written English captions of their words. Soon the Thoughts arrive onstage: three actors who perform and sign in American Sign Language (Mervin Primeaux-OBryant, Malik Paris, Wade Green) and three actors who perform and sing in English (ELLISON K., Damien DeShaun Smith, Jeremy Rashad Brown). It’s only when Usher asks, “Can I really write this?” that Lang enters the stage dressed identically to Silva. The duo offer familiar but new reflections for each other.

A Strange Loop is not a show explicitly written for Deaf performers or about Deaf characters. What is gained by reviving a musical with both? The best Deaf adaptations find dramaturgical justification: their characters don’t just “happen to be Deaf,” but Deaf culture meaningfully shapes characters’ lives, relationships, motivations, and choices. For example, in Deaf West’s 2016 Broadway revival of Spring Awakening, Deaf teens struggled to communicate with non-Deaf parents because of a language barrier. When Deaf teens expressed themselves in song, they signed alongside singing counterparts — non-Deaf actors described as the Deaf characters’ “subconscious” or “guardian angels.”

In VOCA’s A Strange Loop, the Thoughts are more bullying shapeshifters than guardian angels, but that staging resonates in this uncanny show. A Strange Loop cycles through outrageous satires of Broadway, Grindr, the Chitlin Circuit, and Usher’s devout Christian parents. This Thought chorus embodies all of these characters with panache and ribald humor, bringing Jackson’s staggeringly inventive lyrics to life. As someone not fluent in ASL, I can’t speak to how well Director of Artistic Sign Language Kailyn Aaron-Loranzo has adapted Jackson’s language. I do find it harrowing and humorous to see actors sign with flopped wrists when Jackson’s script uses the word “fag.”

Wailes states in the show’s program that with a Deaf Usher, “A different and even deeper perspective is revealed with the frequency of having one’s identity being further scrutinized and challenged.” Indeed, Wailes’ direction shines when differences of identity challenge Usher. The excellent actors who portray Usher’s mother (ELLISON K. and Smith) always communicate to their son without signing. The implication that Usher’s mother is non-Deaf adds more distance in their strained relationship. That in turn makes Usher’s completely signed conversations feel all the more supportive — especially with characters portrayed by Primeaux-OBryant, who offers a charismatic presence.

This show’s combination of ASL, English, song, and captions creates a heightened theatrical language that continually surprises the audience. The absence of Simultaneous Communication (SimCom), when a person signs and speaks simultaneously, also helps performers not to water down their idiosyncratic performances.

Other times the Thoughts’ fluid staging proves frustrating. Characters like Usher’s father and agent are portrayed by Deaf and non-Deaf actors, and I wondered if these characters’ prejudices would be more clear if definitively portrayed as non-Deaf. Wailes’ complex staging sometimes feels too literal (video projections visualize language already communicated by actors) or too abstract (the use of silhouettes in a humiliating sex scene feels like a cop-out from Jackson’s raw writing).

What this production nails is Usher’s distressed relationship to his own mind. Silva and Lang’s performances bind and diverge like contrapuntal melodies. Audiences watch Usher fracture into two bodies: Silva’s performance will sometimes become earnest and sincere, while Lang simultaneously becomes exasperated and sullen. Having Usher staged by two partners-in-crime onstage risks draining the musical of its terrifying loneliness, but Wailes uses Lang’s presence purposefully. During Usher’s crucial solos and monologues, Lang will sometimes sit in the audience or stand silently beside Silva, feeling like a dissociative part of Usher’s mind.

Silva’s and Lang’s performances offer a triumphant, surrealist doubling. When Usher looks across the stage at his other self, it’s like a performer confronting his audience, or an artist staring at his own creation. To me, it felt like Lang often represented Michael R. Jackson and Silva represented members of the Deaf community. Jackson premiered this musical six years ago, but somehow Usher has twisted out of Jackson’s control. Usher’s now performed and reinterpreted by people who both share Jackson’s identities but also layer their own identities on top of his.

There are limits to this layering project, to adding on identities to shows that aren’t written with those identities in mind. When Usher states at the top of the show that he’s “able-bodied,” I went with it because not all members of the Deaf community identify as “disabled.” Yet near the climax of the show, Usher critiques the systems of oppression he’s caught in, stating “…the anti-Black world we live in gets so strung out on this color-blind ‘love is love’ bullshit.” A Deaf Usher would absolutely also call out society as anti-Deaf. But the word “anti-Deaf” is unfortunately trapped in this production’s subtext. Yes, there are fat, Black, queer men who are also Deaf — but Usher doesn’t explicitly discuss Deafness in A Strange Loop the way he does Blackness or queerness.

This is the pitfall of productions that add identities onto characters — from the “color-conscious” casting of Hamilton to the Black-led Broadway production of Gypsy to contemporary realist plays that don’t specify the races of their characters. All of these shows resonate more deeply by casting actors of marginalized identities in their main roles, but their scripts don’t actually speak directly to people of those identities in the audience. I’m reminded of August Wilson’s 1996 speech “The Ground on Which I Stand,” in which he critiqued colorblind casting for refusing to stage Black Americans’ “philosophy, mythology, creative motif, social organization, and ethos.” The Deaf community certainly has all those things, too. But despite VOCA’s resonant casting, this production of A Strange Loop can’t stage the Deaf community fully due to Jackson’s hyperspecific script.

However, this production of A Strange Loop draws out a dissonant aspect of the musical: creating art as a form of self-harm. I’ve always thought the theme connecting A Strange Loop’s vignettes was humiliation. But watching two actors stare into each other’s eyes as Usher, it felt like the older version of Jackson was forcing the younger version of himself to constantly relive his worst fears and experiences. This constant reliving is also just life. Without the older Jackson restaging the younger Jackson, A Strange Loop would never exist at all.

I think about the 20-year-old version of myself who first listened to A Strange Loop in 2019, feeling like his world had dramatically cracked open. I know the unbearable pain he’ll go through in the next six years, and part of me wants to remove him from the loop, to end his suffering. Still, I know he’ll become the person who nervously goes back to see that same musical in 2025. He’ll discover another version of himself, beautifully performed, staring back at him onstage. He’s ready for the next verse of a familiar but somehow new song.

Running Time: One hour and 40 minutes.

A Strange Loop plays through August 10, 2025, presented by Visionaries of the Creative Arts and Deaf Austin Theatre, performing in the Sprenger Theatre at Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H St NE, Washington, DC. Tickets range from $29.25-$45.25 (fees included) and are available online.

The program for A Strange Loop is online here.

Ages 18+ (adults only). Content Warnings: Mild use of flashing or strobing lights. Frequently occurring swearing or coarse language. Regularly occurring sexual content. Mild references of self-harm, sexual assault, and grief.

Aboug this collaboration, playwright and Pulitzer Prize winner Michael R. Jackson said:
“I am thrilled that Deaf Austin Theatre and Visionaries of the Creative Arts are collaborating to bring A Strange Loop to their audiences. Though A Strange Loop is told through Usher’s very specific lens, it has always been my intent that his story resonates universally throughout the human condition. I believe these two theaters will crack the piece open even further in a unique way that only they can do and for that reason, I enthusiastically support this co-production.”

A Strange Loop
Book, Music and Lyrics by Michael R. Jackson
Directed and choreographed by Alexandria Wailes

CAST
Usher – Gabriel Silva
Voice of Usher – Tyler “T” Lang
Thought 1 – Mervin Primeaux-OBryant
Thought 2 – ELLISON K.
Thought 3 – Malik Paris
Thought 4 – Damien DeShaun Smith
Thought 5 – Wade Green
Thought 6 – Jeremy Rashad Brown
Swing – Elbert Joseph
Swing – Terrence Berry

CREATIVE TEAM
Producer, Artistic Director, VOCA – Michelle Banks
Producer, Artistic Director, DAT – Brian Cheslik
Director and choreographer, Associate Artistic Director, VOCA – Alexandria Wailes
Associate Director / Music Supervisor – Stanley Bahorek
Music Director – Walter “Bobby” McCoy
Director of Artistic Sign Language (DASL) – Kailyn Aaron-Lozano
Creative Service Manager – Def Lens Media

PRODUCTION & DESIGN TEAM
Line Producer – Andrew Morrill
Production Manager – Bethany Slater
Stage Manager – Sarah Poole
Assistant Stage Manager – Katie Loyd
Assistant Stage Manager – Jason Eastman
Lighting Designer – Helen Garcia-Anton
Set Designer – Jessica Trementozzi
Costume Designer – Isabelle Fields
Sound Designer – Liv Farley
Projection Designer – Julian Kelley
Caption Designer – Andres Poch
Intimacy Director – Emily Sucher

SEE ALSO:
Deaf theater companies co-produce fresh staging of ‘A Strange Loop’ (news story, July 8, 2025)

The post With a Deaf protagonist, ‘A Strange Loop’ finds more resonance and dissonance appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

You can learn a lot about a character by how they enter a room. In “Be Good” with Paulette, now playing at DC’s District Fringe Festival, the title character’s entrance is utterly ridiculous. The mustachioed man, Paulette (brilliantly performed by the show’s playwright, Daniel Maseda), knocks on the door of the theater, setting up the audience for a knock-knock joke. However, Paulette can’t help himself, interrupting the audience and guiding us to then ask “Whom?” and then “Whomsoever it may be today?” This interaction is the entire character: fastidiously presented and completely sincere, but technically incorrect and hilarious to watch.

What follows is a cavalcade of increasingly silly audience interactions. Paulette asks if he’s overstayed his welcome, curious as to how this room is not the Notebook Society. He asks audience members their jobs — when one person responded that she was a “fundraiser,” he responded loudly, “Ah! An arsonist!” Soon, we come to know his idiosyncratic approach to language: malapropisms, non sequiturs, and playful (if labored) turns of phrase. By the time Paulette asks someone, “Can I make profound eye witness to your eyes for just three seconds?” you realize this isn’t the preamble to the show, this is the show.

Maseda has created a fascinating theatrical space, brimming with details while formally abstract. The show is not plot-heavy: Paulette’s attempt to get onto the stage is its own odyssey, and taking off his sweater becomes a nearly bureaucratic process. Maseda also doesn’t burden Paulette with some tragic backstory or psychoanalysis. All we have is Paulette’s interactions with the audience, which start as simple crowd work but soar into laugh-out-loud delirium. Once we understand that Paulette will never give a straightforward answer to our questions, the audience starts asking increasingly absurd questions — until our mutual ridiculousness forms a bond of respect, but also a simmering sense of loss.

It’s hard to track when, exactly, this sense of loss arrives. Without indulging in the analysis that Maseda resists, it’s clear that Paulette is obsessed with always behaving correctly in every social interaction — but that obsession is the very thing making him awkward, turning him into both a comic fool and a tragic hero. There are moments when Maseda’s freewheeling action coheres into pure physicality, whether it be somersaulting comedy or horrifying stares. It felt like I was watching a confused child in a grown man’s outfit, which is how so many of us feel every day.

Maseda’s working in a tradition of comedians confronting polite society but also society itself, including Oscar Wilde and Nathan Fielder. Occasionally, I wished “Be Good!” was more upfront about the society it was confronting. Paulette seems trapped in a mid-Atlantic world (his clothing feels distinctly mid-20th century, and he speaks in an enunciated American accent with some British phrases thrown in), so it’s hard to know exactly what world Paulette seeks to assimilate.

Still, this choice allows Paulette to become the unfettered id of all our conformist impulses. Everyone has an impulse to smooth ourselves into acceptable forms. But Paulette’s actions, if not his words, offer an alternate lifestyle: his jagged edges, oddball quirks, and sometimes quiet desperation make him (and us) infinitely more compelling. Long after the show’s “plot” has petered out, you’ll remember Maseda’s impressive performance. You’ll laugh at his absurdity, but you might want to emulate his commitment to trying again and again.

“Be Good” with Paulette
Solo character comedy by Daniel Maseda

Running Time: 45 minutes
Dates and Times:

• Saturday, July 19, 8:45p
• Friday, July 25, 6:15p

Venue: Phoenix – UDC Lecture Hall (44A03)
Tickets: $15
More Info and Tickets: “Be Good” with Paulette

Genre: Solo performance, character comedy

Written and performed by Daniel Maseda

The complete 2025 District Fringe Festival schedule is online here.
The 2025 District Fringe Festival program is online here.

The post 2025 District Fringe Review: ‘ “Be Good!” with Paulette’ by Daniel Maseda (4 ½ stars) appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

If you were having a conversation with yourself, what would you ask — and how would this other version of you respond? This is a classic playwriting prompt, one that’s inspired media about confronting your younger self, or resolving conflicting emotions. It’s also inspired journalist, playwright, and performer Pamela H. Leahigh to create Hey Pamela? Yes Pamela? now showing at DC’s District Fringe Festival. In this 50-minute show, Leahigh stages an inner dialogue that’s sometimes humorous, sometimes humiliating, but always conflicted.

The show opens with Leahigh introducing herself to the audience, letting us know that it feels like “there’s two of me up here, on a good day.” There’s the confident, abrasive version of herself she calls “Too” (as in “too much”), and there’s also the shy, anxious version of herself she calls “Pamela.” Writing down conversations between these two selves inspired the unique format of the show: she invites a friend to read a prewritten script, and randomly act out either Too or Pamela. At my performance, theater creator Chris Sullivan arrived onstage and read as Too, while Leahigh read as Pamela.

The show’s many Too/Pamela conversations tackle standard material for standup comedy: dating, loneliness, unhealthy habits, everyday inconveniences, and struggles with self-confidence. Leahigh is an astute observer of culture, but she doesn’t sharpen her observations quite into observational comedy. Her stories elicit some laughs, but mostly moments of recognition.

Some topics Leahigh brings up also feel opaquely written. She references bad-faith criticisms of her role as a television journalist, but with no context about her workplace, the script feels drained of politics and specificity. At one point, the character Pamela also states that “we are selfish and blind and stupid” —  and the “we” she’s using could refer to Too/Pamela, or DC audiences, or all of America. While these multiplicities feel exciting, the dialogue feels too vague to pierce with true clarity.

The best part of the show is the strained relationship between Too and Pamela: the two characters act as each other’s bullies, cheerleaders, pests, and friends. This dynamic reminded me of the musical A Strange Loop, where a chorus of “Thoughts” transform into different versions of a protagonist’s self-loathing. That musical’s ensemble could become deranged and even emblematic of systemic oppression. But the performances of Hey Pamela? Yes Pamela? maintain the calm geniality of two colleagues. And though Leahigh acknowledges that many people deal with similar issues, she never explicitly calls out the systems or institutions that frame her personal struggles.

Hey Pamela? Yes Pamela? is a hybrid show, merging stand-up, dialogue, and improv. I appreciate that it defies categorization, but the show (like its characters) feels at war with itself. By switching quickly between genres, Hey Pamela? can’t quite deliver the methodical storytelling of standup, or the dramatic arcs of a play, or the unfiltered abandon of improv. The show is billing itself as a comedy, but given the show’s emphasis on scripted conversation, it’s clear to me that this show would function best as a true drama. If Leahigh focused on crafting character journeys for Too and Pamela, she’d surpass her sometimes disappointing jokes and launch us deeper into her fractured mind.

Hey Pamela? Yes Pamela?
A two-person show where the second person changes every night, by Pamela H. Leahigh

Running Time: 50 minutes
Dates and Times:

• Sunday, July 13, 9:45p
• Saturday, July 19, 5:30p

Venue: Phoenix – UDC Lecture Hall (44A03)
Tickets: $15
More Info and Tickets: Hey Pamela? Yes Pamela?

Genre: Comedy, solo performance

Written and performed by Pamela H. Leahigh

The complete 2025 District Fringe Festival schedule is online here.
The 2025 District Fringe Festival program is online here.

The post 2025 District Fringe Review: ‘Hey Pamela? Yes Pamela?’ by Pamela H. Leahigh (2 ½ stars) appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

Growing up as a triplet, I felt like I didn’t own my identity. Everyone would compare and contrast my body and personality against my siblings — I existed against them, despite wanting to be like them. This is the same confusing coming-of-age faced by the sister protagonists of The H Twins, Hope Campbell Gundlah’s harrowing new play now at DC’s District Fringe Festival. But unlike me, the sisters are trapped in 1940s Germany, with horrors imminent and unescapable.

The show starts in an abstract space, before historical details give context. Hilda and Helga (portrayed by the playwright and her real-life twin sister Tess Cameron Gundlah, respectively) enjoy their highly routine lives. Uncle M (John Elmendorf) gives them both psychological evaluations and treats, instilling in them that they’re “biologically valuable children.” Two nurses (Lisette Gabrielle and Rebecca Husk) secretly provide the sisters access to American media, inadvertently inspiring them to become vaudeville stars. But the patronage of adult characters is confining, and references to “Aryan” values abound. As the sisters reach adolescence, the pressure to perform to perfection soon becomes crushing.

The H Twins is structured on a cruel dramatic irony: we know they’re imprisoned in Nazi Germany, even though the sisters don’t. Hope Campbell Gundlah based this play on Dr. Josef Mengele’s terrifying experiments on twin siblings, along with Lebensborn homes that attempted to raise children with idealized “Aryan” bodies and values.

The combination of two related-but-different histories makes the show feel more speculative than real (the show’s marketing explicitly asks “What if?”). But if the premise strains credulity, The H Twins succeeds mostly because of the committed performances of its two leads. Hope’s Hilda obsesses over rules, while Tess’ Helga becomes disillusioned — and both actresses convincingly trace a stunted but intense maturation in a short time frame. The other actors mostly perform in silhouette behind a sheet. This makes sense dramaturgically (the theatrical space feels cold and isolated), but as an audience member I grew frustrated that I couldn’t watch their great performances or see their reactions.

When an artist dramatizes the Holocaust, they face an ethical dilemma: how do you stage a historical genocide without turning it into a generic allegory? The Holocaust resonates with current-day atrocities, but in storytelling, it can often feel like a legend and not a historically specific event. This is the danger with The H Twins, and with so many recent narratives following young Nazi children: the journey from sheltered German childhood to socially-conscious awakening might just be a blunt metaphor for growing up.

As a playwright and performer, Hope Campbell Gundlah mostly avoids this trap by grounding the show’s revelations in specific but often unknown histories. Still, the greatest insight The H Twins provides isn’t into Nazi Germany, but into the overwhelming emotional lives of twins. Hilda and Helga see themselves in each other, but it’s a gross kind of mirror: each reflection is an ideal the other can never achieve. That’s a horror story that doesn’t need to be set against the backdrop of real-life horrors to feel startling. Yet if you’re able to suspend your disbelief on the show’s strained set-up, The H Twins still lands with potent drama.

The H Twins
A dark comedy by Hope Campbell Gundlah

Running Time: 90 minutes
Dates and Times:

• Saturday, July 12, 2:45p
• Sunday, July 13, 5:30p
• Sunday, July 20, 7:45p
• Friday, July 25, 7:45p
• Saturday, July 26, 1:30p

Venue: Phoenix – UDC Lecture Hall (44A03)
Tickets: $15
More Info and Tickets: experiments on twin siblings

Genre: Dark comedy
Content Warnings: Discussion of self-harm, physical violence, and torture

Playwright: Hope Campbell Gundlah
Performed by: Hope Campbell Gundlah, Tess Cameron Gundlah, John Elmendorf, Rebecca Husk, Lisette Gabrielle

The complete 2025 District Fringe Festival schedule is online here.
The 2025 District Fringe Festival program is online here.

The post 2025 District Fringe Review: ‘The H Twins’ by Hope Campbell Gundlah (4 stars) appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

Improvisers should never predetermine their show too much: plotting can confine comedians’ freewheeling creativity. Still, improv shows thrive on structure. The best ones use some kind of device (like a theme, game, or storyline) to frame a night of comedy for both the audience and performers.

Out of My Wheelhouse, a 45-minute improv show now playing at DC’s District Fringe Festival, thrives on its framing device: a surprise theme for each night. The show is written, directed, hosted, and even co-presented (alongside OOMW Productions) by Nora Dell — and Dell has crafted a dramaturgically extravagant show that still allows plenty of room for play.

At the night I attended, the theme was nautical — replete with bubbles, ocean streamers, and Dell in a sailor hat. Holding a microphone, Dell provides a humorous (but surreally poetic) monologue before revealing a game show wheel, which she uses to cycle through improv games for an eight-person ensemble.

The games are classic improv fare (from a Mad Libs-like game to “freeze” scenarios), and sometimes performers lean on very conventional comedy tropes. But when the nautical theme was woven into the improv scenes, performers could embrace their silliness and slowly encourage audiences to do the same. Improvisers Eva Lewis and Gaby Corcoran were highlights, developing a warm rapport onstage. I was also impressed with improviser Peter Bird, who added some low-key, funny details to his scenes that added verisimilitude to the proceedings.

As host for the night, Dell had a great sense of when to let scenes keep expanding and when to move on. On my night, the climax of the show seemed more frenetic than madcap. But the finale ended on a strong note as Dell guided the entire cast to act out increasingly dramatic situations. Out of My Wheelhouse also embraces an element of camp: the game show wheel just does not spin properly, leading Dell to joke, “I think this thing is rigged!”

There’s part of me that wishes the wheel did spin, that the randomness and chance played a larger role in this improv show. But most of me appreciates being led on a wild journey by Dell. When the captain of a ship is this funny, you’re happy with her leading you on an adventure.

Out of My Wheelhouse
Theatrical improv in drag by OOMW Productions/Nora Dell

Running Time: 60 minutes
Dates and Times: 

• Saturday, July 12, 1:30p
• Wednesday, July 23, 7:00p
• Thursday, July 24, 6:00p
• Saturday, July 26, 7:30p

Venue: Phoenix – UDC Lecture Hall (44A03)
Tickets: $15
More Info and Tickets: Out of My Wheelhouse

Genre: Drag, comedy

Directed by: Nora Dell
Playwright: Nora Dell
Performed by: Nora Dell, Erick Acuña, Daniel Barrera Ortega, Peter Bird, Gaby Corcoran, Lauren Gabel, Carly Kraybill, Eva Lewis, Catherine Mullins

The complete 2025 District Fringe Festival schedule is online here.
The 2025 District Fringe Festival program is online here.

The post 2025 District Fringe Review: ‘Out of My Wheelhouse’ by OOMW Productions/Nora Dell (4 stars) appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

Most of the time, life changes incrementally. Bodies sag and falter slowly. Political action takes one step forward and two steps back. Light fades on a summer evening before you realize darkness has settled in, and days fade before you realize years have settled in. But there are also rare times when life transforms dramatically. The world opens up, and can’t be closed again.

Watching Moonlight as a teenager was one of those rare times for me. The film, written and directed by Barry Jenkins and adapted from the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney, is a coming-of-age triptych. The film’s first act follows the young Black boy Chiron as his community struggles to raise him; the second act sees a teenage Chiron discovering his queerness and attraction to his friend Kevin; the third act has an adult Chiron undoing the hardened masculinity he’s used as protection. When I was 17, I stumbled across Moonlight’s hypnotic trailer ahead of its release in the fall of 2016, and convinced my mother to watch the film with me on a rainy Thursday. Despite it being a school night, she relented.

Up until Moonlight, the world of bodies seemed strange to me. I’d watch guys on the sports field or stage, and overhear stories about them in dimly lit basements. I’d imagine their exhausting movement of spit and limbs, but never taste them myself. Instead, I lived in my head. I’d read novels with nerdy, metaphor-inclined teens like Hazel Grace Lancaster, Dante Quintana, and Oscar Wao. They seemed bursting with ideas. I’d pore over Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, especially when she considered the different definitions of the word “queer.” For Bechdel, queerness was a site of theoretical exploration, and I was eager to jump into the discourse. I didn’t want to just come out. I wanted to write about queerness like Bechdel did, with methodical evidence and annotations. Instead of just being myself, I needed to present myself.

Moonlight was the queer rupture I needed at 17. Instead of dissociating in the cinema, I arrived into my body for the first time. The film is composed of poetic, sensual images. Water caressing the head of a boy. A hand grasping at sand. A mother fumbling with a lighter. An ocean breeze dancing across a white shirt. A hand caressing the head of a man. To this day, Moonlight is my favorite film. But as a teenager, the film’s imagery proved that my queerness didn’t need to be researched or justified to be beautiful.

Moonlight was my gateway into physicality. Watching the film quieted the overwrought, anxious, analytical madness that defined my life — replacing it with a calm, warm, embodied presence. I realized I didn’t want to find love with just any guy. I wanted to find love like Chiron’s. Moonlight consecrated my abstract queerness into flesh and blood.

It’s a surreal twist that while I watched Tarell Alvin McCraney’s latest play, We Are Gathered (making its world premiere through June 15 at Washington, DC’s Arena Stage), I felt trapped in my head again. The play’s protagonist is actually similar to the characters I idolized as a teenager: he’s nerdy, metaphor-inclined, and bursting with ideas.

His name is Wallace Tre — but his friends call him both “Tre” and “Dubs.” As played by Kyle Beltran, Tre opens the show directly addressing the audience, explaining that he’s anxiously considering a marriage to his gay partner Free (Nic Ashe). Tre expresses himself through neurotic, stream-of-consciousness monologues. But Free is a boisterous musician, the life of the party. Free just is himself, while Tre presents himself.

The party at hand is Tre’s 40th birthday, a celebration that includes his playful friends Chauncey (Kevin Mambo) and Xi (Jade Jones), but also surprise guests: his astronaut sister Punkin (Nikkole Salter) and their somewhat estranged father, Sr. (also played by Mambo). Sr. starts asking about his son’s sexuality, blaming Tre’s queerness on his own absence during Tre’s childhood. In response, Tre furiously reveals his self-loathing and fear of commitment with Free:

TRE: And now that life is in front of me, I don’t know! And he wants a life! And I don’t even know if I can give him that. Or if I will be able to get over my … self to. And is that enough to do it, just because they might take it away from us? Should we do it ’cause we can because when we can’t? All these questions in my fucking head and you wanna add more?!

It’s only after this exchange that the dramatic stakes of We Are Gathered come into focus. Can Tre accept that he’s deserving of love? Can queer millennials like Tre reconcile their painful childhoods with the tenuous freedoms of adulthood? Answering these questions takes We Are Gathered on discursive paths. Tre wanders obsessively through the park where he first encountered Free while cruising. McCraney wanders through many dramatic forms over the two-act play.

Audiences yearning for the poetry of Moonlight will find it in Tre’s beautiful descriptions of sex (he pays attention to details like “bit lower lips, spit curled tongues, teeth gnashing as fingers find forever”). However, for most of its runtime, We Are Gathered stages the tension between physicality and intellect. Tre feels safe when holding Free, but he’s prone to overthinking how marriage is “a cultural norm made worse by late-stage capitalism.” It’s as if before Tre can love, he must formulate the proper theory for his queerness. Moonlight may have welcomed me into physicality, but We Are Gathered now challenges me with the analytical madness I felt as a teenager, and feel today as a writer. The difficult union between body and mind: that’s the real marriage under question.

We Are Gathered is a significant departure in McCraney’s playwriting style. His Brother/Sister Plays took place in what he calls the “distant present” — an anachronistic space of Black Southern vernacular and dreamy Yoruban ritual. Scholar David Román argues that the distant present “forces us to consider when the contemporary moves from now to then.” Moonlight similarly plays with time, evoking a familiar yet strange world. “I never want to make something that feels so finite that we can only do it at that point, and that’s it,” McCraney stated in a 2017 interview about the film. “I want to make something that feels like we started in a specific place, but we can keep unpacking it for years to come.”

What a difference eight years make: We Are Gathered takes place in the finite here-and-now. Tre’s anxieties about gay marriage are only legible in a 2025 America that passed Obergefell v. Hodges but also overturned Roe v. Wade. His politics also take on a sharp tone when staged in the nation’s capital. McCraney doesn’t name names, but everyone at Arena Stage knows Tre’s talking about Trump when he tells his father, “You voted how you feel about me.”

In the more tangible world of 2025, McCraney luxuriates in contemporary media. Characters reference Pokémon, How to Get Away with Murder, and Sally Field. They ponder Caryl Churchill, quote Shakespeare, reference fairy tales, and close-read Bible passages. McCraney himself alternates between genres — from the marriage plot to the trauma plot, from call-and-response to realist drama, from broad comedy to prayer.

At their best, these dramaturgies create a fascinating friction when brushing up against each other. It’s a riot when Kyle Beltran asks the buttoned-up DC audience to define cruising, or when Free’s grandparents (Jade Jones and Craig Wallace) endearingly ask for details of their grandson’s sexual exploits. McCraney’s arguing that queerness doesn’t belong just in the nightclub or the bedroom — it belongs everywhere, even in the family function.

But at their worst, these dramaturgies compete with each other, rendering the staging and story tedious. The bare scenic design, mostly lamplights, hardly evokes the sweaty erotics of cruising. Even in this highly detailed world, we barely know anything about Punkin’s and Xi’s inner lives outside of their devotion to Tre. We Are Gathered also feels too reliant on monologue. Tre and Free elucidate on pleasure and danger, but the play rarely feels viscerally pleasurable or dangerous. We don’t even get to relive Tre and Free’s meet-cute; Xi just quickly narrates its story.

Of course, staging the past might be antithetical to McCraney’s project here. His pinballing dramaturgy seems like a challenge: can he write beyond an origin story? From Wig Out! to Choir Boy, McCraney’s writing has primarily centered on teens or twenty-somethings wrestling with identity. Even when his TV series David Makes Man focused on adult characters in its second season, it also employed a generous flashback structure. We Are Gathered is still obsessed with origins: Tre shares his first time encountering “faggots” in literature; Free discusses his first cruisings at a college gym. But the play never flashes back to youth for an extended period of time. This is a show resolutely about middle-aged men.

Maybe as McCraney gets older, his “distant past” will age with him (he’s 45 now, writing characters slightly younger than himself). As more millennial playwrights mature, and cash in “blank checks” to write whatever they want, their styles chaotically expand into the chaotic present. We Are Gathered reminds me of recent plays by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: The Comeuppance and Purpose. All three of these shows center on middle-aged Black male artists, self-inserts for their authors. All three shows follow rituals (a high-school reunion, a family dinner, a wedding), with large ensembles debating social issues. All three shows are sprawling, overly verbose, intricately plotted, and messy. Honestly, same.

Watching these plays, I see brilliant minds set loose. Overtaken with ideas, my body slips away. I wander across the endless realm of my mind, creeping toward the future. McCraney and Jacobs-Jenkins acknowledge that they’ve finally come of age. Now what?

This past February, theaters across the country screened a one-night-only IMAX version of Moonlight. Rewatching the film for the first time in years, I was undone all over again by Moonlight’s aching images.

While a film will always stay the same, its viewers will inevitably change. When I watched Moonlight at 17, I had never touched another man, never expressed my sexuality on the page, never been heartbroken, never pleaded for forgiveness when I didn’t deserve it. The romantic scenes between the teenage Chiron and Kevin unfolded like a premonition: here is your near future, if you’re willing to claim it. I did. Yet watching Moonlight at 26, I realize I’m currently much closer to the Chiron and Kevin of the film’s third act. Like them, I’m an adult toughened by my younger self’s choices, secretly believing grace might be possible for me. I can’t let the past go.

Moonlight has become my distant present. It’s my queer origin story — the kind of origin that McCraney now encourages his mature characters to move beyond in We Are Gathered. “You found him,” Punkin tells her brother, asking him to let go of the shame of his first encounter with Free. “Your search for intelligent beings yielded a life you could form; a full life. You found it existed. Fuck how.”

Punkin may as well be talking to me, and my obsession with the first time I basked in Moonlight’s glow. I’ve been chasing that transformative feeling ever since, always thinking that I’ve failed. When I write about McCraney’s art, I feel the magic of his words slipping away through explanation. Maybe, like Tre, I’m overthinking things. As a teenager, I miraculously discovered that queer life was possible. How I received that message ultimately doesn’t matter. It came from the body and the mind; from poetry, prose, film, and theater; from academia and love. Fuck how.

Even though We Are Gathered and Moonlight tonally feel worlds apart, they’re bound together by McCraney’s collapse of linear time. In the program for We Are Gathered, Arena Stage Literary Manager Otis Ramsey-Zöe references José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. He specifically cites Muñoz’s configuration of sexuality as an optimistic gesture toward the future: “Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present.”

What’s ironic is that academics have used McCraney’s art to critique Muñoz, especially his hope that the future will be better for Black and queer Americans. Scholar Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman uses Moonlight as a primary example of what she calls “the black ecstatic,” a representational mode that celebrates Blackness in an abstracted present, not an imagined utopia. “A post-civil rights expressive practice, the black ecstatic eschews the heroism of black pasts and the promise of liberated black futures,” she writes, “in order to register and revere the rapturous joy in the broken-down present.”

I’m overwhelmed with the beauty of Muñoz’s and Abdur-Rahman’s arguments, even if their theories are incommensurable. Which queer movement will I follow? Will I imagine a future beyond “toiling in the present,” or will I ecstatically revere the “broken-down present”?

By blurring adolescence with maturity, McCraney tries to move in both directions, to affirm both theories — to have his wedding cake and eat it, too. Especially in its third act, Moonlight celebrates the broken-down present by staging intimacy in real-time. But the film ends right as Chiron and Kevin have their long-delayed unification. We’re allowed to imagine their future without having to experience its likely excruciating path forward. If We Are Gathered is overstuffed, it’s because McCraney wants us to feel that excruciating path forward. Tre and Free arduously propel themselves into the future, through the mess of daily life, overanalysis, political threats, and yes, references to Sally Field.

Even more than championing marriage, We Are Gathered champions resilience. Queer life might not “get better,” but it will be. Many audiences will talk about the play’s ending, a satisfying conclusion where lives change dramatically. But in the preceding hours, McCraney celebrates incremental change, the accumulation of love that forms the foundation of a dramatic moment. You can’t achieve the rupture of Moonlight without the personal and artistic processing portrayed in We Are Gathered.

The present moment in We Are Gathered is not distant, but so close — and maybe for me, it’s upcoming. If I survive long enough to see 2039, I’ll be 40. I might taste the mature love seen in We Are Gathered instead of just witnessing it. The play will have become a period piece, a curious time capsule of our anxieties in the distant present of 2025. But I hope the accumulation of years has made the show more urgent.

Every piece of art can be an origin story for our lives, if we’re willing to claim it. I did with Moonlight, then. And I do with We Are Gathered, now. I do.

We Are Gathered plays through June 15, 2025, in the Fichandler Stage at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater, 1101 6th St SW, Washington, DC. Tickets are available online (starting at $59) or visit TodayTix. Tickets may also be purchased through the Sales Office by phone at 202-488-3300, Tuesday through Sunday, 12-8 p.m., or in person at 1101 Sixth Street SW, DC, Tuesday through Sunday, 2 hours prior to each performance. Groups of 10+ may purchase tickets by phone at 202-488-4380.

Arena Stage’s many savings programs include “pay your age” tickets for those aged 35 and under; military, first responder, and educator discounts; student discounts; and “Southwest Nights” for those living and working in the District’s Southwest neighborhood. To learn more, visit arenastage.org/savings-programs.

Running Time: Two hours and 40 minutes, with a 15-minute intermission.

The We Are Gathered program is downloadable here.

COVID Safety: Arena Stage recommends but does not require that patrons wear facial masks in theaters except in designated mask-required performances (Tuesday, May 27, 7:30 p.m., and Saturday, June 14, 2:00 p.m.) For up-to-date information, visit arena stage.org/safety.

SEE ALSO:
You need to see how ‘We Are Gathered’ at Arena celebrates Black queer love (review by Gregory Ford, My 25, 2025)

The post My queer coming of age with Tarell Alvin McCraney appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

i. basic

 The first time I encountered what I call a “theater bro,” it was in my first semester of college.

It was September 2017. I was attending Wesleyan University, a small liberal arts school in Middletown, Connecticut — it’s a college that carries prestige for people who actually know that it exists. As I nervously went through my first week of classes, in every cafeteria conversation, it felt like I was being interviewed to see if I’d be a good friend or collaborator. It was the year after Hamilton swept the Tonys, and the musical’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, had just become the university’s most famous alumnus. Every student at Wesleyan, even if we didn’t admit it, believed we could also make it big through our art.

Walking around campus, I had a serious case of imposter syndrome. Somehow, I’d schemed my way into a world where every guy was experimental, edgy, and cool. I could only pass as one of them. Back in my Virginian private school, I was surrounded by more traditional “bros”: guys who told crass jokes, got lacrosse scholarships, and sported dirty Nike socks and ratty mullets. Up at Wesleyan, I was surrounded by a new artsy kind of bro: guys who gave you unprompted fun facts about the film Whiplash, complained about Middletown being too rural compared to Manhattan, and donned so many beanies to the point of parody.

One evening I was hanging out in the common room of Butterfields: a dank, winding dorm colloquially referred to as the “Butts.” A lanky guy struck up a conversation with me, and I mentioned that I was in a class called “Award-Winning Playwrights.” When the guy asked me what my favorite play was, I froze. Before this class, I’d only read Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams; I didn’t have an idiosyncratic answer to offer. The first play assigned in my class was Angels in America, so I blurted that out.

“Basic choice, but a classic,” he responded. He then gave a long anecdote on Annie Baker: how he’d performed her observational but profound plays, and how I should really read them. I nodded along, trying to hide the sting of humiliation. Back in Virginia, I was eccentric compared to the bros. But here, I was “basic” compared to them. I needed to study more plays so that I could prove myself as belonging with the theater in-crowd.

I soon became friends with this lanky guy. But for years, I resented him for being so dismissive in our first conversation, for making me feel so small. It wasn’t until recently that I realized he was trying to prove himself to me. At the time, he was insecure, too.

ii. good person

Jane — the protagonist of the Max Von Friedlich play Job, now running at Arlington’s Signature Theatre — also resents the people from her college. She’s in one of the most intense hours of her life, holding her work-assigned therapist hostage. Yet she’s still drawn to mocking her alma mater, and the virtue-signalling Instagram posts that flooded that kind of world. Her terrified therapist asks if she’d ever publicly share those thoughts, but Jane rejects the premise.

“I don’t own it though,” she says about herself. “I’d never put that out there. I’d get ripped apart… On like Twitter or Instagram. Like people I went to college with would explode at me.”

Explosions — psychological, physical, and societal — keep happening for Jane, with no relief in sight. Over the course of an extreme 90 minutes, Jane holds her therapist captive, alternately arguing, pleading, threatening, and opening up to him. The dialogue feels startlingly familiar to the words I’ve spoken to my own friends, in college and beyond. Seeing Job, I felt uncomfortably similar to Jane. This may be because Friedlich and I have similar experiences. He graduated from Wesleyan in the spring of 2017; we missed sharing the campus by one semester.

Job opens with Jane (Jordan Slattery) wielding a gun toward a therapist, Loyd (Eric Hissom). Loyd soon convinces Jane to put down her gun, and she apologizes profusely, placing her weapon gingerly into her Trader Joe’s tote bag. Still, she won’t let Loyd leave the room — she’s come to his office to get approval to return to work, and she won’t leave without it.

The rest of the play functions as a tense standoff. Working professionally and defensively, Loyd starts asking questions about Jane’s upbringing and career. With much reservation, Jane shares that she was working as an online content moderator at a technology company until she had a mental breakdown. An incident of her screaming went viral, and she was placed on paid leave, despite desperate attempts to return to work.

Throughout their conversation, Jane constantly pushes back on Loyd’s therapy-speak, and starts grilling him on his own life. Loyd is a Berkeley graduate working in downtown San Francisco, a folksy type who’s cautious about technology and avid about his teenage children. The clash between the two characters becomes generational. Jane is rebuking the liberal world she’s inheriting from Loyd. Loyd is defending that world while wielding more institutional power than Jane.

Watching Job at Signature Theatre, I saw a similar generational clash happening in the audience. Job was originally staged in two off-Broadway venues, before a 14-week Broadway run in 2024. The play gained greater notoriety after a TikTok video praised the show’s writing and direction, which then spurred a group of trendy, young New Yorkers to watch the show.

These New York audiences probably aligned themselves politically and generationally with Jane. But much of the Virginia audience, composed of middle-aged regional theater subscribers, probably aligned themselves at the start of the play with Loyd. There were a few times at the performance I attended where I was the only one laughing at Jane’s snarky jokes — specifically when she calls herself a “Xanax girlie” and admits that all of her college friends “were literally socialists.” Maybe I only laughed at these jokes because I’m Gen Z. Maybe I’m just fluent in Jane’s brainrot culture, which isn’t as popular in DC.

Even as Jane and Loyd’s conversation twists in unexpected directions, Jane keeps bringing up her time in college. It’s like a rash in her memory, one that she can’t stop scratching. She calls her college friends “cringey rich assholes.” She remembers a toxic college relationship, which had abundant sex but limited intimacy. Jane even rails against her school’s aesthetic:

JANE: …Literally all I can remember about the first semester of college was trying to figure out how to dress like I cared about social justice and the cafeteria workers’ union and gender-netural bathrooms. To give a shit I had to smell like shit – I had to wear ratty t-shirts to be publicly accepted as a good person.
LOYD: Did you enjoy college?
JANE: Loved it.

In these lines, I hear echoes of my experiences with theater bros. I applied for early decision to Wesleyan because of its collaborative environment (as opposed to the cutthroat Ivy League). But when I arrived on campus, it was jarring to face new pressures. Every student seemed to compete for status as the most socially conscious, the most radical, the most controversial. In the face of this, many Wesleyan students found a subversive pleasure in being “normie.” In an academic world where everyone strove to be avant-garde, many resisted by behaving as mainstream as possible. I’ll admit, I felt oddly disruptive if I wore a polo shirt to a class.

The desire for mainstream appeal was shared by the university administration. In the wake of the 2016 election, Wesleyan University President Michael Roth promoted what he called “intellectual diversity” and the expansion of student athletics. “Athletes on campus have different perspectives from the avant-garde surrealist pop guitar player from Park Slope,” Roth said in a Slate article published during my first semester. “You can’t be a caricature of yourself,” he continued.

Even if my college has a caricatured reputation as activist and abrasive, it’s an energy that I love (like Job’s Jane). At its best, the university felt like a refuge, where gays and artists could gather away from our stifling hometowns. But also like Jane, I knew this refuge was an illusion. A few students had families that gave them immense power on campus and beyond. Their last names appeared in film credits and Broadway playbills and on the sides of buildings. In Job, Jane also arrives at this bitter realization: “But one day it just sort of hit me – I was nothing like them. / I didn’t have an uncle who could get me a job on a TV show.”

I felt relief hearing this line, hearing unspoken privileges finally named. But I also knew these words were coming from a character that was jaded and violent. Was Friedlich asking the audience to understand someone like me, even if I was rendered delusional? And did Friedlich write these words as a self-critique?

iii. boygenius

Like many Wesleyan students, Friedlich grew up in New York City and was introduced to the arts at a young age. He grew up going to a live-action roleplaying summer camp, and in high school, he wrote a play called SleepOver. After studying American studies at Wesleyan, he continued producing his own work, briefly wrote for television, and joined playwriting programs. Friedlich was inspired to write Job partially through two experiences: speaking to an overworked content moderator and helping run accounts for the fictional influencer Lil Miquela.

On one hand, Friedlich himself is the epitome of the “theater bro” that Jane and I resent: a Manhattan socialite who had industry advantages before stepping on a college campus. Just look at how Wesleyan University Magazine tells Friedlich’s story. A feature on him is very specific about the ways he’s had a “D.I.Y. approach” to theater, like raising $10,000 through Kickstarter. But when discussing his family’s career influence, the article suddenly turns vague: “His parents… have supported his artistic aspirations and helped him make connections along the way.” I wish I had parents who could make connections like that.

On the other hand, Freidlich’s upbringing isn’t that different from my own. I’m pretty much the DC equivalent of a Manhattan socialite: I went to an expensive private school, never had to worry about financial independence until the age of 18, and did read Shakespeare before college. I’ve benefited from all of the systems I’m calling out.

Maybe I’m angry that, even with my vast privileges, there are people like Friedlich with even greater privileges. Maybe I don’t hate Max Wolf Friedlich as much as I want to be him. Maybe my resentment for him comes from a sublimated envy. Part of this envy comes from knowing Friedlich’s career path is impossible for me to follow. When Friedlich graduated college in 2017, he could explore the theater industry and develop Job in small venues like the Connelly Theater. When I graduated college in 2021, I found a theater industry limping from the pandemic, with even fewer entry points. No one’s producing plays at the Connelly nowadays.

In another world, I’d love to read the script of Job blindly, not knowing the writer’s age or background. But theater doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and Friedlich’s status as a boygenius wunderkind allows Job to be produced. There are writers similar to Friedlich who also explore the disaster of the Internet. Watching Job, I’m reminded of the chronically online characters satirized by Patricia Lockwood, Tony Tulathimutte, and Honor Levy. What distinguishes Friedlich from his colleagues, and what catapults him into fame, is his role as a dramatist. He’s highly attuned to the audiences hearing his words and writes for them. In a profile for Vulture, Friedlich shared his pride that Job was attracting niche subcultures: “We’re a hit among teenagers; we’re a hit among NYU people and Dimes Square motherfuckers.”

As Friedlich navigates an increasingly commercial career, he’s drawn further from these subcultures. I know about the Dimes Square scene out of morbid curiosity, but most people watching Job in Virginia don’t. In that same Vulture profile, Friedlich acknowledged his capitalist impulses, saying “half-jokingly” that he’s making “theater for boys.” He stated: “If the industry is going to survive, we need 30-year-old bros to get onboard thinking this is a cool thing.”

I see Friedlich’s concept of “theater for boys” as similar to Michael Roth’s concept of “intellectual diversity.” Both are trying to welcome a male demographic into a space where they’ve previously felt sidelined. I’m sympathetic to this mission, but when I hear “theater for boys,” my first instinct is to roll my eyes. I mean, come on. Thirty-year-old bros already run Silicon Valley and Hollywood and the government — they don’t need more space, especially in one of the few industries where marginalized people work consistently. We don’t need affirmative action for white guys. Of course, Friedlich, catering to a bro crowd, can make it to Broadway early in his career. Meanwhile Paula Vogel, writing mostly about queer women, had to wait decades for the same career honor. This double standard isn’t Friedlich’s fault, but it’s an advantage for him.

Whether we like it or not, the U.S. government is creating a new era of “theater for boys,” particularly in DC. The National Endowment for the Arts is eliminating any funding for works that support diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s also introduced “gender ideology” restrictions on funding. Lin-Manuel Miranda recently pulled Hamilton out of the biggest performing arts organization in DC, and its new leadership responded by saying, “Hamilton can’t perform for Republicans” and “Stop the intolerance.”

The two worlds I anxiously navigated as a teenager (conservative Virginia bros and artsy Wesleyan bros) are colliding at an alarming pace. I feel like I’m going insane. If the current political administration had its way, there would only be theater for boys, and nothing else. Max Wolf Friedlich should be careful what he wishes for.

iv. kill

The first time I felt myself becoming a theater bro, I was midway through college.

I’d been compensating for my freshman-year insecurity by taking as many theater classes as possible. In one class, we read Andrea Abi-Karam’s poetry collection Extratransmission. The self-described “punk poet-performer” was visiting our class, and one of our assignments was to ask Abi-Karam a question directly. I was fascinated by their poem “KILL BRO/KILL COP,” which explores male violence through the police, military, and literature. The poem’s speaker imagines enacting violence in return, imploring: “kill all the bro poets. actually you know what, kill all the bros. kill all the power dynamics in the room.”

I wondered why Abi-Karam chose the word “bro” as their enemy. Why not “man,” or “dude,” or even “bruh”? But when I asked Abi-Karam this very question, they responded incredulously: “Because I just really hate bros.” Even though I asked the question in good faith, the poet stared at me with such disdain. I could tell they found my question condescending. In Abi-Karam’s eyes, I was just another bro.

In too many ways, I’ve become the Wesleyan theater bro that I’ve always resented. I mostly cover plays like Fairview and Slave Play — they’re confrontational and somewhat inaccessible to people just discovering theater. When my Wesleyan friend was putting together an interview with Annie Baker, she reached out to me since I’m now the guy who recommends that playwright to people. My status as a Wesleyan grad also confers a prestige I couldn’t have imagined in my freshman year there. “You guys are everywhere in theater,” an editor of an arts publication recently told me. This mystique might be the reason I’ve stayed in DC, not moving to Brooklyn like most of my college friends. Compared to the khaki-wearing crowd of the nation’s capital, I’m finally experimental, edgy, and cool.

So many people discover who they are by critiquing archetypes. Abi-Karam critiques bros. Job’s Jane critiques Loyd’s entire generation. Dimes Square celebrities launched their careers by critiquing liberals, and journalists gained notoriety by critiquing Dimes Square. Wesleyan grads make fun of Wesleyan. Railing against someone can be creatively fulfilling, so we create enemies in our heads to playfully and cruelly mock.

Max Wolf Friedlich has become that enemy for me. Anyone who’s willing to say he’s making “theater for boys” is an easy target for derision. True, the nuances of Friedlich’s ironic humor probably don’t translate well in a written format. But reading that Vulture profile, I saw someone antithetical to the kind of artist I’m trying to be.

Friedlich comes across so confidently in that profile, but Job is full of vexed insecurity. At Signature Theatre, I felt completely unnerved by Jane and how deeply she was self-conscious and critical of her place in the world. It seemed like Friedlich was reaching through the stage to slap himself in the face, to call himself a “cringey rich asshole.”

Perhaps Max Wolf Friedlich’s real enemy is himself. He knows the caricature he sometimes embodies, and keeps scratching at that figure in his memories, knowing it’ll make him miserable. There’s a kind of perverse pleasure in eviscerating yourself on the page. I know it well; it’s why I’m writing this essay. Maybe Friedlich already knows how other people resent him, because he’s felt the same resentment for himself. Maybe he really is just like me.

v. obligation

If Friedlich writes “theater for boys,” why did he make the protagonist of Job a woman? I think it’s to illustrate how Internet culture specifically targets women. In the fall of 2019, close to when Job is set, writer Jia Tolentino published the essay “Always Be Optimizing.” She argued there’s a contemporary pressure for everyone to “optimize” themselves, to constantly perform (online and IRL) for maximum efficiency. “It’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation, to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible,” Tolentino wrote. “Women have known this intimately for a long time.”

As Job progresses, audiences discover Jane’s escalating obligations. As a content moderator for a tech company, she watches the worst of humanity and purges it from the Internet, so no one but her must witness it online. Unlike Tolentino, Jane understands her tortured work as a noble quest. “I feel it all – and it’s a privilege to suffer as much as I do,” she states. She later says that she’s battling a natural evil, configuring herself as a kind of classic avenger heroine. Like Eve, she’s cursed with knowledge. Like Cassandra, she’s doomed to speak the truth to a world that doesn’t believe her. Jane is an agent of self-justified chaos.

More than anything in the Signature production of Job, it’s Jordan Slattery’s performance as Jane that’s stayed with me. She opens the show in a dazed terror, brazenly wielding her gun but also cradling her tote bag like a child. Slattery interprets the character as a woman overwhelmed with duty but fearless in her conviction. Slattery’s spoken lines are sarcastic and terse, but her eyes betray a vulnerability that dialogue can’t express.

Slattery is doing what great actors do: honoring a playwright’s world but somehow moving beyond anything that playwright could imagine. I was disappointed by the ending of Job: the show felt like a tightly constructed rollercoaster, where twists thrilled me but also felt inevitable. Yet as Friedlich’s story stayed on a set track, Slattery’s disturbing performance made me feel like I was flying off the rails.

My hope is that all audience members of Job can follow the lead of Slattery, using Friedlich’s play as the foundation to create our own worlds. It’s an approach we can apply to every part of the theater. I don’t necessarily endorse Jane’s crusade in Job. But I do understand her command to “feel everything,” because my privilege and my suffering, like hers, feel impossibly intertwined. Even though I don’t agree with hardly anything Friedlich said in that Vulture profile, I find his unfiltered honesty to be weirdly aspirational. I want to be just as candid in my own work. And that first-semester conversation at Wesleyan? It’s forged me into the writer I am today. I’ve optimized myself into the very artist that intimidated me.

If I really have become the elite Wesleyan theater bro that I’ve always hated, I hope I can weaponize my privilege for a good cause that’s still confrontational. When I’m feeling most generous, that’s what I see Friedlich doing in Job. Even in Friedlich’s “theater for boys,” he’s creating a space for theater bros to be undone. Friedlich might be ceding the stage for someone like Jane or Jordan Slattery, someone better than the theater bro. Someone better than me.

Job plays through March 16, 2025, in the ARK Theatre at Signature Theatre, 4200 Campbell Avenue, Arlington, VA. For tickets ($40–$90), call (703) 820-9771 or purchase online. Information about ticket discounts is available here.

Running Time: Approximately 90 minutes with no intermission.

The program for Job is online here.

Closed captions are available via the GalaPro app.

COVID Safety: Masks are optional in the lobby and other public areas of the building. Signature’s COVID Safety Measures can be found here.

The post A theater nerd confronts ‘theater for boys’ appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

By the time Doug Robinson finishes telling a story, he’ll likely make his listener smile from ear to ear. At least, that’s what happened to me when I recently interviewed the playwright over Zoom.

The multi-hyphenate theater creator is from Virginia and has had his plays staged in a variety of DC-area theaters, including Faction of Fools and Imagination Stage. His writing, which features both delirious whimsy and emotional intelligence, earned him a MacDowell Fellowship. He also recently earned an MFA in Playwriting from the Geffen School of Drama at Yale.

Many of Robinson’s plays engage with a mythological or folktale structure while still subverting audience expectations. I asked Robinson how he first developed his love of folktale, and he explained that he was introduced to them as a child. He was enthralled with a watercolor picture book retelling the Japanese legend of Urashima Tarō. In the story, the fisherman Urashima Tarō saves a turtle who is revealed to be the daughter of the emperor of the sea. Tarō is taken to an underwater palace but is allowed to go home with the condition that he never open a mysterious box. When Tarō returns, he finds that an immense amount of time has passed. He opens the box and ages rapidly.

It’s one thing to read the Japanese legend. But it’s an entirely different experience to hear Robinson tell it, with his animated, bright voice. He’s unafraid to retell an ancient tale in his own voice. When recounting the beginning of the story, he told me, “And the turtle’s like, ‘Bet, come back tomorrow. I’m going to have a little surprise for you.’” Robinson’s version was told quickly, with boisterous energy — but when dramatic story beats arrived, he was able to slow down and convey a sense of wonder. Afterwards, even though I’d gone through a narrative whirlwind, I still smiled. I was happy to have gone on such a surprising journey.

Audiences can feel Robinson’s giddy but methodical storytelling in his play The Figs, running at DC’s Rorschach Theatre through March 16. The play is a strange, contemporary folktale. It starts with a Storyteller sharing a fable (also embodied onstage) about a king who’s obsessed with figs — until a lack of them drives him mad. Robinson’s play then spirals out in multiple directions. There’s a competitive family of three siblings (Jin, Jod, and June), all determined to share their figs with the King. There’s the King’s daughter Sadie, who runs away to her secret love, the innkeeper Lorna. There’s also plenty of smaller storytelling moments, from songs and mythology to anecdotes and asides.

Audiences watching The Figs will pick up on Robinson’s admiration for (and interrogation of) the act of storytelling. The playwright told me his love of folktales stemmed back to that watercolor picture book and how it blended the mundane with the spectacular.

“There was magic, but also everyday people,” Robinson said. “This was just some fisherman who then found this magical moment. I think so much of what I hope to see in theater is the magic in the ordinary. Where does that exist? How can we punch that up?”

Robinson said that while putting together The Figs, he intentionally wrote a large-scale story. He referenced the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk, which starts out as the story of one boy but twists into unexpected directions, with the Giant and Jack’s mother becoming main characters in different parts of the story. Robinson sought to honor this narrative approach.

“A good folktale or fairytale, if we move away from the Disneyfied version of it all, often has many winding threads of a different color that coalesce in this thing of many events,” he said. “But it’s really more like this tapestry of people who keep intersecting, and then it ends.”

Robinson’s tapestry of people features many characters who pop up for a few scenes, make a huge impression, and then quickly exit the play. These include a “Messenger” who introduces dire news like a customer care agent. A “Nurse” arrives in a pivotal scene with deep insight into the sacrifices made for love. Most memorable is probably a little white fish, who in just two scenes develops an adversarial but also affectionate relationship with June.

Robinson said that every time he presents The Figs, whether in a reading or a production, audience members will always share that their favorite character in the show is the fish. Although The Figs is full of witty humor, it always comes from characters who are trying very hard to achieve their goals — a character trait Robinson very much appreciates.

“I think the good thing with comedy is it doesn’t need to punch down,” he said. “It can also be a reminder of our own connected foolishness.”

For Robinson, writing many minor characters like the Messenger, the Nurse, and the Fish allows him to tell his audience that so much is possible in his plays.

“I think why it works, to have all these characters, is I try to build a world first and foremost,” he said. “Once the audience has accepted the rules of that world, which are that people of all sorts can appear and engage, they’re actually excited and hungry for the next discovery.”

Even with a hunger for discovery, there’s a risk for any storyteller telling a winding tale: they’ll test the patience of an audience. The Rorschach production of The Figs lasts two-and-a-half hours plus an intermission. Robinson acknowledges the risk of losing an audience — he doesn’t want the audience to go, “Oh God, another fucking thing?” when a new character arrives late in the story. But he also shares that the original draft of The Figs was “40 pages longer.” He did significant editing to balance all the storylines and characters while not compromising a folktale structure. The question he asked himself during edits was, “What fills the world but does not oversaturate the world?”

“The world is so big, yet we can only get a little snapshot of it,” he said. “It is a good story’s job to remind audiences of how vast the world is and the many possibilities that exist. To not show a singular path, not show one right way of being, but to remind us there is no single thing and there can never be a single thing.”

Because of The Figs’ vast world, many audiences might draw parallels to real life. Although most of the play takes place in an anachronistic fantasy land, I find many resonances between characters trying to survive a tumultuous political era and my colleagues and I doing the same in 2025. This DC production about a power-hungry king is being staged at the same time that the President of the United States is sharing royalty-inspired artwork on social media that reads “LONG LIVE THE KING!” There are juicy, uncomfortable comparisons to be made, even if The Figs doesn’t function as a one-to-one allegory of the present day.

I asked Robinson how he believes “evil” functions throughout folktale storytelling, and thus within The Figs. Robinson said that although he doesn’t excuse violence that characters commit, he’s also not interested in completely antagonizing his characters. Mostly, he doesn’t find the idea of “evil” to be compelling for writers or audiences.

“I don’t think that evil makes good dramatic action, whether it’s in a folktale story or a contemporary lens,” Robinson stated. “I think people with unchecked power is an interesting bit of dramatic action. I think people who choose to be kind in the face of cruelty is interesting in dramatic action.”

LGBTQ audiences and audiences of color might find personal resonance with The Figs as well. As a member of both communities, I’m fascinated by metatheatrical moments in Robinson’s script, when characters acknowledge the societal roles they’re asked to perform. Sadie tells the King early on, “Don’t play the caring father. The costume is ill-fitting.” After a tragedy, June remembers being sidelined when playing with their siblings: “I had to take the part they gave me or I couldn’t play. I didn’t play very much.”

Even though Robinson isn’t explicitly writing about contemporary systemic oppression, his words feel true to people experiencing them. I’m reminded, weirdly, of what critic Wesley Morris wrote about the horror film Get Out: “[Filmmaker Jordan Peele] made a nightmare about white evil that doubles as a fairy tale about black unity, black love, black rescue.” Now, The Figs is much more playful than a horror film. But I see the show as operating on a similar level as Get Out. Both artworks confront painful injustices, but their use of genre tropes create an accessible entry point for marginalized audiences, who together can root for our collective rescue.

The Figs articulates that mission toward the end of the show. June, who emerges as a central figure, enters a liminal space that the Storyteller calls “the margins.” “Everything that could be and even the things that couldn’t be exist in the margins,” the Storyteller remarks.

Robinson told me this scene was one of the last he wrote for the play. He was collaborating with director Helen R. Murray on the show’s 2024 world premiere production at American Stage, and they both wanted to express how expansive the world could be for the characters.

“This is not a story about June who reunited with [their] ‘nuclear family,’” Robinson told me. “This is not that story. In fact, this is a story about someone who finds a family on the road, who realizes that they’ve had companionship of a different kind their whole life, and a love that is going to transcend that kind of Americana look.”

The Rorschach version of The Figs, only the show’s second professional production, offers a unique journey for the audience. Director Randy Baker has created an immersive experience where audience members physically travel through Rorschach’s performance space, previously a two-story clothing store. Although audiences eventually settle into seats, the staging mimics the twisty narrative of the play itself.

With this production, Roboinson said he’s finding a balance between being available to the creative team for feedback while also giving Baker and producer Jenny McConnell Frederick enough distance to reimagine the show on their own. Robinson said he’s happy to participate in theater any way he can.

“If someone said to me I couldn’t be a playwright — cool, whatever, fine,” he stated. “But if someone told me I couldn’t make theater, I’d be devastated. Being in every aspect, engaging whether it’s tech or auditions, I’m overwhelmed just to be there every time. So I’ll be a part of any production as long as people will have me.”

This production comes at an interesting time in Robinson’s career as well. Looking back on his time at Yale, he’s said he’s thankful that the program allowed him to develop his own unique writing process, even if he learned the most from his fellow playwriting peers. Robinson also admits that being a Yale graduate opens certain doors for him — but he’s “forever grateful” to the theater companies like Rorschach, which read his play submissions earlier in his career.

Robinson is now working on a new play, Cactus Queen. It’s a story in which a mother attempts to resurrect her dead son, who is played onstage by a puppet. Although it might seem like a darker departure from both The Figs and some of his work for young audiences, Robinson believes all his work is tied together through imagination.

“I want [audiences] to say that my plays made them see the scale that theater can be,” he said. “That doesn’t mean scale like budget and all the big sets. But look at that little puppet. Look at that little puppet catching a butterfly. Look at that grieving mother hold that puppet like it’s her own child. I believe that that is her child. Oh my God, I’m believing in something. I’m not suspending my disbelief, I’m choosing to actively believe.”

Belief — in the arts, in institutions, in the country — is being tested right now for artists and audiences in the DC area, as the government asserts an increasingly large role in arts organizations locally and nationally. The Figs didn’t immediately strike me as a show about resistance or revolution. However, the longer I’ve thought about it, the longer I’ve appreciated how the play’s characters don’t seek out joy or a happy ending. They instead seek out stronger integrity.

“If there’s one value I hold most dear in this moment of my creative process, it is a deep love for earnest characters, earnest storytelling,” Robinson told me. “Cynicism and irony have their place. I love the absurdist. I love my fucking angry, burn-it-down play, I do! I just don’t have it in my spirit to write that right now. What is in my spirit is to write people who — in the midst of storms, and ungodly things, and unholy things, and cruel things — choose to believe in something, choose to really put themselves in the action that they are doing. Not with a wry smile, not with a sardonic attitude.”

I wondered how, in the midst of so much unrest, Robinson was able to foster such an imaginative approach to theater. Over the past few weeks, I’ve felt jaded and emotionally exhausted, considering leaving the arts industry altogether. I admire, and perhaps envy, Robinson’s ability to feel so connected to the younger version of himself who asked his mother to read a watercolor picture book over and over again. In our conversation, Robinson emphasized that he isn’t staging the wonder of childhood. Everyone else might be performing a kind of stolid maturity.

“I think adulthood is kind of a costume more than it is a thing that actually happens,” Robinson said. “I pay taxes. I have responsibilities. Let’s not pretend that life doesn’t get more complicated. But this idea that imagination —  or silliness or playfulness or earnestness and believing in something — is a naive concept seems antithetical to what is needed for the world to move forward. Actually, it is through imagination that we can dream and think beyond our current circumstances.”

“I take many things in this world seriously,” Robinson continued. “I am a student of history and philosophy, and I am not someone who believes that everything is happy-go-lucky. But I also think that imagination is the only way forward.”

The Figs plays through March 16, 2025, presented by Rorschach Theatre performing at 1020 Connecticut Avenue, Washington, DC. Purchase tickets ($50 adult, $35 student and seniors) online.

Running Time: Two and a half hours with a 15-minute intermission.

The playbill for The Figs can be downloaded here.

SEE ALSO:
Rorschach Theatre’s ‘The Figs’ tells a bizarre fable about an obsessed king (review by Haley Huchler, February 19, 2025)

The post Playwright Doug Robinson believes ‘imagination is the only way forward’ appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

There comes a point in every Dave Harris play when the world falters, and something disturbingly true tumbles out.

In Exception to the Rule (running through October 27 at DC’s Studio Theatre), an inner-city detention classroom is plunged into surreal darkness. Soon, a seemingly straight-laced student Erika reveals a harrowing account of the ruptures in her identity. In Incendiary (which had its world premiere at DC’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in the summer of 2023), a mother Tanya goes on a wacky, madcap adventure to free her incarcerated son from prison. In a thrilling reversal, the audience quickly realizes Tanya’s death drive is hopelessly misguided, and we understand the horrific truths underpinning the farce.

Then there’s Tambo and Bones (which tours across the UK next summer), and its triplet reveals. The play moves from an existential comedy to a rap concert to an Afrofuturist world, each time folding in strangely specific details and histories within the dialogue. These moments feel like Harris dancing through his self-written chaos to catch a brief glimpse of the audience. Even though this dance is well choreographed, it’s still disarming for audiences to immediately match Harris’ gaze.

Over the past year and a half, I’ve reviewed the DC productions of Exception to the Rule and Incendiary. Although Dave Harris started as a poet and even published a poetry collection, Patricide, in 2019, his theatrical breakthrough came in 2022 when he had two plays off-Broadway within the same year. These were Tambo and Bones at Playwrights Horizons (directed by Taylor Reynolds, a director who often works in DC), and Exception to the Rule at Roundabout Theatre Company (directed by Miranda Haymon, who previously had a fellowship at Arena Stage).

Although I’ve found Harris’ works thrilling in their surprising structures and twists, I’ve also felt the DC audiences around me shifting in their seats with discomfort, both physical and emotional. Maybe Harris’ truths are too disturbing to accept with immediate grace. Maybe we’re all just trying to understand how the theatrical worlds we’ve been living in have transformed — or rather how Harris transforms the world we live in every day. In any case, engaging with a Dave Harris play isn’t easy: It can be simultaneously pleasurable, painful, hilarious, and terrifying. Still, it’s my hope that the DC community rises to the occasion.

When I spoke to Dave Harris over Zoom earlier this month, he was candid about how his personal life shapes his playwriting (perhaps more candid than any playwright I’ve interviewed so far). He told me that Exception to the Rule is very much drawn from his experiences. Like the characters in the show, specifically Erika, he struggles with how leaving the community in which he was raised is both a gain and a loss.

Harris was born in Los Angeles but grew up in West Philly. In sixth grade, he started attending an all-boys private school, where he was one of a handful of students of color. He says this all happened during “a really rough time,” while his family was evicted from their home and was sleeping on couches. His mother saw Harris’ education as an opportunity.

“Something she said to me as a kid was ‘You have to be able to see beyond your block,’ and like ‘You’re going to be the one that finally gonna escape this place,’” Harris says. “So she kind of gave me that mentality. Again, she didn’t do it with any malicious intent. She didn’t even really know what she was sending me to. She just had inherited this idea that this other place is better, and if you go there and be there, you’ll do something better. You won’t have to live like us.”

Although he purposefully didn’t share this fact much when Exception to the Rule premiered off-Broadway in 2022, Harris started writing it as an undergrad sophomore at Yale. It was his attempt to reckon with his adolescence, when academic success and his family felt increasingly distant.

“Suddenly I was like, ‘Oh, I’m living two completely different worlds, and these things are becoming split from each other,’” Harris says.

In his private school, Harris participated in extracurricular activities, honed his writing practice, traveled across the country, and got into every college where he applied. Despite all of this success, he still realized in college how much he’d sacrificed in order to get where he was.

“I ate that shit up, and then I got to college and was like, ‘Wow, I’ve turned my back on so much,’” Harris says. “And also this place I’m at is just as fucked. Also, this place I’m at tokenizes me and has done all of these things, like I’ve changed myself so much in order to earn a dead white man’s approval. And that was sort of the crisis that led to Exception to the Rule.”

Black upward mobility is a throughline in all of Harris’ playwriting — it’s an internal conflict he externalizes and then connects to larger Black American histories. For example, the two main characters of Tambo and Bones are “clowns” who gain success by performing minstrel-like shows for a white audience, in both historical and allegorical performances.

Harris wrote Tambo and Bones after Exception to the Rule when he realized there was a market and appetite for Black struggle narratives. Characters might try to escape detention in Exception to the Rule, but in Tambo and Bones, characters can’t escape society or history.

“We’re watching characters try to escape, and we find with each act, they escape somewhere further, they ascend further and further,” Harris says of Tambo and Bones. “Nothing fills the original hole. The question that they will have to confront is that original void. Is that void caused by the loss of home? Caused by slavery and oppression and 400 years? Is that void just human nature, and actually all of us are trying to fill something?”

Part of Harris’ critique in Tambo and Bones extends to the audience itself. There’s even a metatheatrical address in the play that calls attention to the racial dynamics in the audience. Tambo addresses an audience that, in the world of the show, is Black — but in production, the actor will likely be performing in front of a mostly white crowd. Tambo asks, “How could anyone know freedom in a world where they are always being watched?”

Harris isn’t alone in questioning how dramatists of color can live under a threatening white gaze — I’ve also written about that struggle in this publication. Although writers of color feel this most acutely, every writer must struggle with a thorny question: Who do you write for? Slave Play playwright Jeremy O. Harris encourages other Black playwrights to “make black art for your black self.” Cost of Living playwright Martyna Majok expresses her goal of writing for and about her friends and family. Alternatively, experimental Black playwrights like Michael R. Jackson and Jackie Sibblies Drury build entire shows confronting a white gaze. I’ve personally been haunted by words from poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong, who writes, “Even to declare that I’m writing for myself would still mean I’m writing to a part of me that wants to please white people.”

I bring up this question with Harris, who has multiple responses to it. Similar to Hong, he believes that even if there’s part of yourself that thinks about a white audience, “that doesn’t make it any less you.” Similar to Majok, he writes to make his friends laugh, especially his fellow playwright friend Mara Nelson-Greenberg. Simultaneously, he acknowledges that his characters and plays live separately from his life.

“I had a poetry professor, Elizabeth Alexander,” he says. “One of the quotes she would always say is that as soon as you put something down, it kind of doesn’t belong to you anymore. You create something to look at yourself, and it can look back at you in a way. But the act of writing is the act of putting something impossible inside of you onto something else, and then leaving that for anyone else to read whatever they want into it.”

Harris also brings up how he’s increasingly aware of the commercial and capitalist forces that move behind a piece of artwork. He’s selective about what film and TV projects he chooses to join — he’s currently in the writing room for the Apple TV+ television show Widow’s Bay. Harris says he’s so selective because he wants to protect what draws him to writing in the first place.

“The hard thing is having to work on that side and also making sure I don’t lose the things that feel of my own impulse and the most inexplicable,” he says. “Inexplicable in the sense of, like, I’m chasing something I don’t actually know where it’s going.

“There are maybe four places in the world where I feel most myself,” Harris continues, with a laugh. “It’s when I’m writing, cooking, dancing, and having sex are the places where I’m the most me. Things are happening before I have the ability to process where the impulse is coming from. When writing is best for me, it’s happening before I can think and be conscious of the forces affecting it. I love being in that space.”

Harris’ questioning of the film and television industry also extends to the theater world. Both off-Broadway productions of Exception to the Rule and Tambo and Bones were scheduled for 2020 — until the pandemic scrambled production plans, and the Omicron wave in 2022 continued to impact shows even when they were staged. Harris says he’s seeking a more “sustainable” relationship to productions of his plays.

“As exciting as it was and as proud I am of those productions, it was a really, really intense and really trying time,” he says. “It took more energy than I ought to have given to it. But partly I had been waiting so long, so we were just obsessed with it. I love theater so much and I have no intention of ever stopping. And also, I think what I took from that was I need to protect my energy and space, because it can really take a lot from me without giving a lot back.”

Harris sees himself as a writer first and foremost. That means he appreciates the collaboration process of production, but also acknowledges that his first love of theater didn’t come from seeing productions.

“I arrived to playwriting, and I never really saw any shows in New York,” he says. “I didn’t grow up going to plays. My whole understanding of theater was all through the literary art of it.… Roundabout [Theatre Company] programmed my play before I had even seen a play at Roundabout.”

Harris also is frank about treating playwriting as literature — an art form that can be appreciated solely through reading. He values the written word the most of all.

“I’m so grateful for production, so many beautiful things happen inside of it,” he says. “Also in some ways — this might get me in trouble — it’s the part of the process I care the least about. To me, playwriting is a literary form. I come from a poetry background, and poetry and playwriting don’t exist separately for me. My love of theater came entirely from reading it, not from seeing it. So when I’m writing the play, the thing that I care the most about is the reader experience and my experience of reading and writing it. I feel so protective of that.”

Readers of Dave Harris’ plays will appreciate their innovative forms. The climaxes of both Exception to the Rule and Incendiary are startling monologues — ones that, like an Adrienne Kennedy one-act, break theatrical form and radically discuss the potential filth, disgust, and madness of Black culture. This is particularly true of Incendiary, in which audiences finally face the character of Eric (Tanya’s incarcerated son), and he delivers some shockingly masochistic lines about murder. When I saw the Woolly Mammoth production last summer, those lines elicited scoffs, gasps, and nervous laughter. We had reached a vertiginous breaking point.

Harris says that it’s important for him to earn those shocks, both for the characters and himself.

“Part of the reason why I think all of these monologues happen in my shows is because we’ve pushed the character through humor and spectacle and rhythm,” Harris says. “A lot of my plays have a certain rhythm that they operate inside of, we’re using that to push someone to the brink, where suddenly they have to say something that hasn’t come out yet. I think that is usually for me the experience of writing, where I feel like sometimes I’m tricking myself through the journey to finally, inside of myself, realize something I hadn’t encountered before, or hadn’t let myself say, or let myself claim.”

Still, Harris doesn’t want us to completely abandon the humor and spectacle that came before these revelations. For him, writing is still a pleasurable experience.

“Even when my writing is at its worst, most laborious, it’s still really fun because I’m making myself laugh, and I’m surprising myself,” Harris says. “That exploration, I think, lets me go into some places that I think genuinely terrify me, and let me go into places where I’m confronting something that I’ve been afraid to say out loud for a long time.”

Harris’ mixture of confrontation and humor combines in his new play Manakin, which recently won the 2024 Relentless Award. Harris says it follows four generations of a family brought together by a wedding, and if it goes well, Satan will “bring an end to the tedium of mortal existence.” Even though he has no idea how it will be staged, he calls it his favorite play he’s written so far.

“There’s trauma about war, trauma around domestic abuse,” he says. “The play is very much a comedy. It’s fun! It’s funny the entire way through. It’s one where, in more ways than any other play, I think I’m very directly staring into the wound that is family.”

Family is also one of an audience that Harris thinks about a lot, especially as he pulls elements of his own life and transforms them into fictional plays. Sometimes, the reaction he gets isn’t always what he’s expecting.

“My mom saw the reading of Incendiary, and two pages in, she was weeping,” he says. “Then at the end, she was like, ‘Oh that was really good!’ And I was like, ‘Girl!’ I know there’s so much happening inside of you and this is the whole fucking thing, that I know you’re seeing this. I know you’re smart enough to connect the dots and know where it’s coming from. And also, like, you’re not able to share that or say that, and I respect that. Language is not everyone’s tool of moving through the world… I want so much for my family to have access to storytelling, to the ability to narrate for themselves who they are and why they are.”

Still, Harris’ writing has initiated discussions within his family that might never have occurred if not for his literature. Harris hadn’t spoken to his father for around 20 years, but after Patricide was published, Harris’ father reached out to him to meet in San Diego. When they met for coffee, his father brought a copy of Patricide in which he had taken notes.

“We had 20 years of shit to work through,” Harris says. “He was a very problematic figure in a lot of ways. And also I was like, ‘You’re putting in the work to understand this.’ I had to put so much work to understand my family and who I am inside of it. And for the first time, it was like someone else meeting that work with their work. Just the fact of that was really powerful. Suddenly in that moment, I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ What I would want for my family is not just a silent understanding of the shared memory, but also a sense of ‘We can all language our way through this.’”

Harris and I are not that far apart in age: He graduated from Yale in 2016 and I started undergrad at the closeby Wesleyan University in 2017. We’re not necessarily united in the same community — our differences in upbringing and identity are stark, and I hope to respect them. At the same time, I wonder if there’s a generational affinity among us: people born in the mid-to-late ’90s, young millennials but elder Gen Z.

The confrontational, radical monologues of Harris remind me of what scholar Werner Sollors once wrote of Adrienne Kennedy’s plays: “Kennedy’s most important works explore the tragic condition of daughter, mother, father, sibling, and lover in a painful web of American race and kin relations in which violence can erupt at any point.” Harris extends Kennedy’s “painful web of American race and kin relations” to the violent present day. Our generation has benefited from diversity initiatives only to see us tokenized and those initiatives made illegal; we’re asked to study and work in increasingly impossible circumstances; we’re tasked with saving the current world even as it’s clearly in the process of collapse.

Exception to the Rule, Tambo and Bones, Incendiary, and now Manakin don’t seek to save the world, nor do they provide definitive answers or catharsis for audiences. Still, there’s something freeing in the way Dave Harris incorporates the full breadth of life within his plays. Violence can erupt at any time in Harris’ plays, but laughter can erupt at any time, too. Harris might show us how to live in the unpredictable world we call home. If his plays’ truths are too disturbing to accept with immediate grace, maybe grace can grow in our memories of reading and seeing his shows. It’s certainly grown in my memories.

Exception to the Rule plays through October 27, 2024, in the Mead Theatre at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th Street NW, Washington, DC. For tickets ($42–$93, with low-cost options and discounts available), go online or call the box office at 202-332-3300.

Running Time: Approximately 80 minutes with no intermission.
The program for Exception to the Rule is online here.

COVID Safety: All performances are mask recommended. Studio Theatre’s complete Health and Safety protocols are here.

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