86 stories by "John Bavoso"
"During peacetime, when we need metaphors, we raid the language of war. But the idiom of wartime is food: cannon fodder, carnage, slaughterhouse. Buildings and people are pancaked, sandwiche…
It's an image as ancient and archetypal as Medea and La Llorona, and as modern as Andrea Yates"a woman, a mother, standing over the bodies of her drowned children. From this shocking visual,…
As I was watching the DC premiere of Anna Ziegler's inspired-by-a-true-story play, Boy, now playing at Keegan Theatre, there was an Oscar Wilde quote rattling around in the back of my brain …
Am I wearing the right shirt? Is the bottle of wine I brought too cheap? Should I go in for the kiss at the end of the night? These are common questions running through the mind of your aver…
Like it or not, the New Year is rapidly approaching, which means our minds will shortly be turning toward making resolutions and setting intentions for the decade to come. After seeing Taylo…
"The whole impetus of air guitar is world peace," earnestly intones a grown man who goes by the name Golden Thunder right before he goes out on stage in a dingy bar to play a pretend instrum…
"History does not always repeat itself," wrote science fiction writer and editor of Astounding Science Fiction, John W. Campbell Jr. "Sometimes it just yells, 'Can't you remember anything I …
When you leave this world, what are you going to leave behind for your loved ones? Memories? An inheritance? How about an entire fantasy world in which a version of you lives on and offers i…
Hotels rooms are one of those things we largely take for granted but are rich fodder for those of us with overactive imaginations who consistently wonder about the other people who have prev…
Washington, DC, is one of the few cities in the country where it's not uncommon for large groups of people to come together to spend two hours deep in conversation about the constitution and…
It has become a trope of a certain type of made-for-TV movie for the successful, career-driven woman in the Big City to have to return home to her humble beginnings and learn the true meanin…
"The best thing about majoring in Invisibility Studies," jokes Emil Guillermo early on in his one-person show, Emil Amok! All Pucked Up: Harvard, NPR and more, making its DC premiere right n…
DC is (in)famous for being a "transitional" city"people move here, stay for a few years, and then leave. But what happens when you discover your love of playwriting here and then move back t…
Darkness. Silence. The flapping of wings. A gunshot. A single dead dove hovering above the stage. These are the opening moments of Douglas Robinson's surreal look at the senselessness and cy…
Well, it's mid-July, so we're deep in the thick of it and there's no turning back now… it's officially wedding season. It was fitting, then, that I was returning to DC from a lovely weeken…
"Give me one reason to stay here," crooned Tracy Chapman in 1995, "and I'll turn right back around." A few years earlier, a 7-year-old named Duncan MacMillan embraced the spirit of this lyri…
Plenty of pop culture real estate"from The Omen to We Need to Talk About Kevin, to name a few"has been devoted to parents coming to terms with the possibility that their child may be pure ev…
"Fiction carries a greater amount of truth in solution than the volume which purports to be all true," wrote British novelist William Makepeace Thackery, author of Vanity Fair. This simple s…
When asked about how she comes up with ideas for her plays (which, let me tell you from personal experience, is every writer's favorite interview question), playwright, director, and filmmak…
"In the end, we're all just taller children," croons Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Elizabeth Ziman on her band, Elizabeth & The Catapult's, aptly title 2009 song, "Taller Children." T…
There's a notion these days in theatrical circles that the hallmark of a great play is that it can only be a play; that the story being told wouldn't work in any other medium. As I was watch…
In his note in the program of Rainbow Theatre Project's new production of Tennessee Williams' lesser-known play Clothes for a Summer Hotel"his last to be produced on Broadway in his lifetime…
"We're in a strange relationship with our fiction, you see," Warren Ellis, the English comic-book writer, novelist, and screenwriter, once wrote. "Sometimes we fear it's taking us over, some…
Was Anton Chekhov touched with the gift of prophecy when he wrote the first of his four major plays, The Seagull? Or, even rarer, with self-awareness? The piece, which begins with a disastro…
Morrie Schwartz, the sociology professor and subject of Mitch Albom's bestselling book, Tuesdays with Morrie, once said, "Death ends a life, not a relationship. All the love you created is s…
