Richard Henrich News

How could you not love a play about theater critics? Especially where, as in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, now available in virtual format through Spooky Action Theater’s website, the critics are pompous, abrasive and criminally uninformed. Moon (Robert Bowen Smith) and Birdboot (Steve Beall), critics both, are the only audience – perhaps we should say witnesses – to the butchery known as Murder in Muldoon Manor. Muldoon is an enterprise so catastrophic that it makes Nothing On (the calamity being performed by the actors in Noises Off) seem like Beckett, or Shakespeare, or – Stoppard.

Among the Dead, written by Hansol Jung and directed by Richard Henrich is playing at the Spooky Action Theater in Washington DC between February 14 - March 10, 2019 and will undoubtedly rouse your awareness of the resilience and vulnerability of the human psyche.

Of her dozens of books over a long career, just one title by the esteemed science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin has been adapted a couple of times -- her 1971 'The Lathe of Heaven,' the futuristic story about the power of dreams.

Surprising. Cerebral. Intoxicating. Mysterious. Thrilling. Prescient.  These are just a few of the adjectives used to describe Spooky Action Theater productions in recent years. And these are also perfect adjectives to portray its 2017-2018 Season. 

Spooky Action Theater opens its season with a cutting-edge play that covers politics, celebrity, and the nature of genius. RAMEAU'S NEPHEW, adapted from an 18th century work by Denis Diderot, is hardly new, but this 2016 incarnation is as timely and amusing as can be. Director Richard Henrich delivers a production with flashes of outright brilliance that compensate for a few (non-fatal) flaws.

From the first darkly comic scene, Spooky Action Theater's COLLABORATORS plunges its audience into a tension between hilarity and terror. As the play unfolds, there is laughter at the absurdity of the situation and simultaneous dread over what will happen next. A revisionist account of Mikhail Bulgakov's writing of a play about dictator Joseph Stalin in 1930s Moscow, COLLABORATORS is inspired by fact but considers what could have happened behind the scenes.

KWAIDAN (Japanese for 'ghost stories'), Spooky Action Theater's current production, is a must-see, although it is impossible to describe this mood piece. The performance plays mind-games with the attendees, making them feel like they are surrounded by spirits.

Can a play marked by ambiguity be successfully told? Are memory and imagination two opposing or complimentary forces? Both are questions which inhabit and seek to be answered in Spooky Action Theater's riveting production of Tennessee Williams' The Two-Character Play.

For one weekend in November, Touchstone hosts Spooky Action Theater and their production of The Lost Ones, a prose text by Samuel Beckett adapted for the stage. The show will perform November 18-21, 2010.

For one weekend in November, Touchstone hosts Spooky Action Theater and their production of The Lost Ones, a prose text by Samuel Beckett adapted for the stage. The show will perform November 18-21, 2010.