Potomac Theatre Project is an Off-Broadway powerhouse of veteran and emerging talent creating socially and politically acute theatre for the 21st century. In its 3 1/2 decades, the voices of PTP’s writers have addressed the necessity and difficulty of art, homelessness, censorship, pornography, AIDS, totalitarianism, apartheid and gender wars—always in passionate, deeply human terms. Playwrights whose work is often seen on the company’s stages include Howard Barker, Caryl Churchill, Harold Pinter and Neal Bell; recent seasons included Vaclav Havel & Bertolt Brecht.
by Steven Berkoff
*New York City Premiere*
PTP/NYC’s “Lunch” rich, searing and absorbing
A woman and man, (ostensibly) strangers, engage in a provocative encounter that forces them to recognize their loneliness. Sexy, rude and funny.
“Berkoff is a kind of Shakespeare of invective, writing with a savagery of scorched earth warfare but also an alluring eloquence and imagination.” New York Times
by Caryl Churchill
Hot Fudge is an explosive short play about greed and self-invention – a bleak, black comedy
“Hot Fudge, is a complete pleasure… the excellent cast gives perfectly calibrated, extremely funny performances.” Show Showdown
Here We Go is written in three brief scenes. The play drifts from conversations among mourners at a post-funeral party to the dying process of (possibly) the man mourned and finally a wordless sequence with a man and his caregiver.
“Here We Go… is a heart-felt tribute to a deceased man and a vibrant portrait of him…” Theatre Scene
DOG PLAYS
by Robert Chesley
A VARIANT STRAIN
by Jonathan Adler and Jim Petosa
A pairing of two plays juxtaposes stories of gay men across two pandemics, placing a rarely-performed work from the AIDS era in the United States (DOG PLAYS) alongside a new story for the COVID era (A VARIANT STRAIN). Based on interviews about gay men’s lived experiences of AIDS and COVID, the dialogue between these stories reveals new possibilities for understanding and healing across generations.
“The Potomac Theatre Project is doing “The Dog Plays,” the strongest and most moving theatrical treatment of AIDS I’ve ever seen. Robert Chesley, the author, died of AIDS last year (1990), and his three short plays — playlets, really — are meditations on death: its horrors, ironies, unfathomability, inevitability.” – Lloyd Rose, The Washington Post
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