Poet, Performer, Theatre Artist, Playwright, Educator, Writer--Robert Michael Oliver, Ph.D., has been involved in the DC arts scene since the 1980s, when he co-founded The Sanctuary Theatre in the old sanctuary of Calvary United Methodist Church. Since those fierce days in Columbia Heights, he has earned his doctorate in theatre from University of Maryland, raised two wonderful children, and seen more theatre as a reviewer over the last two years than he saw in the previous thirty. He now co-directs, along with his wife Elizabeth Bruce, the Sanctuary's Performing Knowledge Project, which organizes a host of writing and performance workshops, plus Mementos: Poetry and Performance for Seniors, a yearly literature-in-performance Fringe Festival show, as well as Performetry--a monthly poetry and prose performance event at DC's community arts & culture center BloomBars.
BWW Previews: SONG OF MYSELF: THE WHITMAN PROJECT - A Capital Fringe One-Man Show that Contains Multitudes
July 6, 2014
July 6, 2014
I've had a love affair with poetry that reaches back over 40 years, years before my career as an educator and theatre artist...
BWW Reviews: Truth, Lies, THE ADMISSION
May 4, 2014
May 4, 2014
If you have not had the opportunity to experience this workshop production, you should not miss the opportunity to witness this rarest of theatre pieces. The Admission, by Israeli playwright Motti Lerner, does what few plays succeed in doing. The play confronts with searing honesty a reality few want to know or much less think about, giving voice to all sides of a situation that continues to rattle the world: the birth of Israel and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. And it does so without resorting to hyperbolic rhetoric, contemptuous righteousness, or what so often happens, melodrama.
BWW Reviews: Fiasco's THE TWO GENTLEMEN (One Gentleman) OF VERONA Couldn't Be More Charming
April 23, 2014
April 23, 2014
Fiasco Theatre's production of Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona, delights and impresses. Lighthearted and gay (as in 'keenly alive and exuberant'), the six-member ensemble's streamlined presentation of the tale is filled with chuckles and bubbles, buffoonery and romantic jests.
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