Fight Call: On the Welders' new MMA play The Girl in the Red Corner

Audrey Bertaux and Jennifer J. Hopkins grapple in rehearsal for The Girl in the Red Corner. (Photo: Darrow Montgomery)

Today's Washington City Paper has a feature from me about a new play from the DC theatre collective The Welders set in the milieu of mixed martial arts. It's by Stephen Spotswood, a prolific dramatist whose work I have followed with interest for the last five years or so, and it's the first play about a bloodsport here in DC since Studio Theatre did Sucker Punch in early 2012. (I did a feature on that one, too.) You can use the link above, or pick up a dead-tree copy wherever finer alt-weeklies are given away for free.

Be Brief, I See into Thy End: Fear, reviewed.

Vince Eisenson, Matthew Alan Ward, Seamus Miller, and Amal Saade in Fear.

I had the good fortune to interview Star Trek's resident alien linguist Marc Okrand this week, for a video that'll posting next week as part of Air & Space / Smithsonian's coverage of Trek's 50th birthday. I met Marc through his involvement in DC theatre. After the shoot, we got some coffee and talked about—well, okay, yes, about his work on various Trek movies mostly, again, some more. But we also discussed how much we both enjoyed writer/director Kathleen Akerley's ambitious new play FEAR, which I review in this week's Washington City Paper.

For evidence of just how pear-shaped the genre of plays-about-playmaking can go, consider Jackie Sibbles Drury’s unaccountably popular We Are Proud to Present…, a story about a half-dozen actors working to “devise” a play about a historic tragedy of which they know nothing. Though it’s meant to look improvised, it’s fully scripted, and the it's the single worst play I’ve ever seen in my professional or biological life. Akerley's play needs a revision, but it ducks the self-absorption that makes Drury's so, so insufferable.