CW: Violence against womxn, abuse, gaslighting, misogyny, and serial murder The Drowning Girls, currently up at Strand Theater Company, may be the rare piece of art that I can almost forgive for not really passing the Bechdel test (the famous measure of representation of women in art that asks if a work features at least two women who talk to

Did theater panic at the invention of movies? Did it happen again with television? I feel like every other year (pandemic notwithstanding) there are a thousand overblown articles about what’s killing the stage. Netflix is never going to have the same language as theater, nor does film, and neither, unfortunately, does the “thilm” that occurs when you try to shoot

BY THE BAD ORACLE Late winter isn’t exactly the right time for ghost stories, despite the uneasiness of transitional seasons, but Baltimore small theater is serving them up to largely good effect.  Lola B. Pierson’s The First Thing That Happens, with a limited run at the new Voxel (brainchild of Christopher Ashworth of theatrical software company Figure 53) is haunted

A REVIEW BY THE BAD ORACLE Lizzie Andrew Borden, true-crime buff’s darling and (seeming) center of Lizzie: The Musical, was acquitted of the murder of her father and stepmother in 1892.  Does that mean fuck-all when it comes to public opinion of the crime?  Nope, it sure doesn’t.  Guilty she was, in the eyes of pretty much everyone, and guilty

Photography by Shealyn Jae A REVIEW BY THE BAD ORACLE Topher Payne’s Perfect Arrangement, as directed by Patrick Gorirossi, zips and zings along so merrily for the first hour or so that we might be tempted into thinking that the “arrangement” really isn’t so bad:  Millie and Bob Martindale (Ari Juno and Gabe Fremuth) and Norma and Jim Baxter (Holly Gibbs

A REVIEW BY THE BAD ORACLE Tom Stoppard was 27 when he wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and it shows.  It’s definitely got that late-twenties sense of ennui where you’re laughing at your own stupid existential despair because you’re old enough to feel it but still young enough that it doesn’t mean anything yet.  Stoppard has a great quote

A REVIEW BY THE BAD ORACLE Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, like most Important And Classic Novels, really only has like one good part.  A mad scientist sews up a man out of man pieces and then fires up the fucker (and if you think this is a sexy premise, and would like to make a play out of it, just

A REVIEW BY THE BAD ORACLE The first few moments into FPCT’s Jerusalem are absolutely horrible.   A disheveled man swans and swaggers his way across one of the most disgusting places I’ve ever seen, a post-hard-party trailer yard (set from Christopher Flint is top-notch) covered in all manner of unholy litter.  The man washes in a moldy water barrel, eats

A REVIEW BY THE BAD ORACLE Lance Bankerd doesn’t so much play Jim Jones (the cult leader who was the direct cause of death of 918 of his followers in November 1978) profiled in Aladrian C. Wetzel’s Thank You, Dad, up at Baltimore Theater Project.  Bankerd engages with him, struggles with him, confronts him and, in the end, channels him.  I

(Bad Oracle here:  now proudly doing ONE NIGHT STANDS!  These are special reports and/or reviews of one night, short run, or one off performances or shows.  We want to celebrate what’s happening in a variety of small arts scenes in Baltimore:  performance art, comedy, burlesque, student, etc.) A Raisin in the Sun – Lorraine Hansberry’s classic A Raisin in the